Dominic Raab: The hon. Lady is right to say that the first responsibility is of course with any parent or prospective parent who would take their children out to a conflict zone. We have made it clear that we are willing to repatriate unaccompanied UK minors or orphans where is no risk to UK security. We would consider carefully individual requests for consular support more generally and subject to national security considerations, but of course the UK has no consular presence in Syria from which to provide assistance, and that makes it very difficult to help, but we respond to cases on a case-by-case basis.

Stephen Gethins: On behalf of the Scottish National party, may I be the first Scottish MP to welcome you to your place, Mr Speaker? On 16 October, the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, the hon. Member for South Derbyshire (Mrs Wheeler) told the Foreign Affairs Committee that the UK was failing to attend meetings to discuss the situation in Syria, not least the increase in migration and the refugee crisis. Will the Foreign Secretary tell us what possible benefits there can be from failing to attend these meetings? What are the foreign policy implications of this, and will he change his mind about non-attendance?

Heather Wheeler: Congratulations from the west midlands as well, Mr Speaker: everybody is congratulating you.
We actively use our influence to speak up for persecuted Christians and individuals of all faiths or beliefs at the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe and the UN, among other bodies. Throughout our diplomatic network, we lobby Governments for changes in laws and practices and raise individual cases of persecution in countries recently including Egypt, Indonesia and Sudan. I am delighted that my hon. Friend the Member for Gillingham and Rainham (Rehman Chishti), the PM’s special envoy for freedom of religion or belief is working very hard as well

Heather Wheeler: I thank my right hon. Friend for that wonderful question. I am delighted to include the British Museum’s work as another area of soft power for the great UK and for global Britain everywhere. My right hon. Friend is standing down and will be greatly missed not only here, but in the middle east, where his expertise and humanity are respected by everybody.

Rehman Chishti: Mr Speaker, may I join all colleagues around the House in congratulating you on your elevation to Speaker of the House?
The key human right is article 18 of the universal declaration of human rights and people being able to practise their religion openly and freely. May I pay a huge tribute to the former Foreign Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Surrey (Mr Hunt), for commissioning the Truro review on the persecution of Christians and the current Foreign Secretary for all the work that he and his team are doing in taking forward that review? Recommendation 10 requested the Foreign Secretary to write to key organisations such as the British Council, the Westminster Foundation for Democracy and Wilton Park, so may I thank him for  writing that within 24 hours? Will he review this in 12 months to see how they are doing in taking forward freedom of religion and belief as part of that?

Henry Smith: May I be the first Sussex Member of Parliament to be called in your speakership to congratulate you on your election to the Chair, Mr Speaker? In that county, I am privileged to represent probably the largest number of Chagos islanders anywhere in the world. I have no doubt about UK sovereignty over the British Indian Ocean Territory; however, human rights have been neglected ever since the Wilson Administration forcibly evicted the Chagos islanders from their homeland in the late 1960s. Will the Minister assure me that, as we go forward, Chagos islands human rights will be better respected in terms of a right of return and nationality issues?

Andrew Percy: Mr Speaker, you might be from the wrong side of the Pennines, but it is a delight to see you in the Chair and for impartiality to be returned to that office.
As we continue to expand our consular network overseas, may I urge the Minister to look at the proposal that I recently wrote to the Prime Minister about with regard to a permanent consular post in Atlantic Canada not only to support the very many Brits who travel there every year, but to make better use of our trading relationship post Brexit?

Gavin Robinson: In Belfast, they might say, “Good on you, auld hand,” Mr Speaker, but we are delighted with your elevation.
The Minister knows that I will not go into details about this case because of its sensitive nature, but I want to pay tribute to him: my constituent is now home from Cameroon and in the arms of his family. They are incredibly grateful to him for the work that he has done and to Sir Simon McDonald, Chris Ribbans, Sharon Gannery, the deputy commissioner, and Amena Begnum Ali for all their tremendous work. There is a family full of love and joy in my constituency where they did not think that that would happen, so I thank him.

Catherine West: May I say how delighted I am to have a rugby league fanatic in the Chair, Mr Speaker?
Can the Minister update me on my constituent Aras Amiri? What urgent action is being taken in Tehran for this woman, who is a British Council employee? Tragically, her family here are heartbroken because they have not had an update on what is happening with her desperate case, following her imprisonment under false charges.

Dominic Raab: I know at first hand from my time working on human rights in war crimes and for human rights NGO, Liberty, how important the work of Human Rights Watch is. We want to see that continue, and of course we support it in general terms. We discuss a whole range of issues with our Israeli partners. The Israeli Supreme Court has a strong record of independence and has held the Executive to account on many occasions. It is important that we respect the separation of powers there as well.

Imran Hussain: I congratulate you, Mr Speaker, and I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. Following on from the Secretary of State’s previous response, it has been three months today since the draconian illegal blockade in Kashmir began. Thousands continue to be arrested without any due process. There are food shortages and medicine shortages, and persecution, oppression and injustice continue, yet the UK Government remain silent. The United Nations Security Council remains silent, and the international community remain silent. The sons and daughters of Kashmir are asking a simple question: does a Kashmiri child not feel the same pain as any other child? Does a Kashmiri child not bleed in the same way as any other child? Is a Kashmiri child’s death not worth the same as any other child’s death? Why is the world silent?

Emily Thornberry: Thank you very much, Mr Speaker, for granting this urgent question. May I thank the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) for securing it and for all his efforts?
I can only echo the words of the right hon. and learned Gentleman about the utterly unjustifiable, unprecedented and clearly politically motivated reasons for delaying the publication of the report until after the election. This is not at the request of the intelligence agencies. There are no foreign powers we have to consult, which was the reason for the delay of the rendition report. This is nothing less than an attempt to suppress the truth from the public and from Parliament, and it is an affront to our democracy.
We are bound to ask: what is Downing Street so worried about? Why would it not welcome an official report into attempted Russian interference in the 2016 referendum, whether that was successful or otherwise? I fear it is because it realises that the report will lead to other questions about the links between Russia and Brexit, and with the current leadership of the Tory party, that risk derailing its election campaign. There are questions about the relationship between the FSB-linked Sergey Nalobin and his “good friend”, the current Prime Minister. There are questions about the Prime Minister’s chief aide, Dominic Cummings, his relationship with Oxford academic Norman Stone, the mysterious three years that he spent in post-communist Russia aged just 23, and the relationships that he allegedly forged with individuals such as Vladislav Surkov, the key figure behind Vladimir Putin’s throne. And there are questions about the amount of money flowing into Conservative coffers from Russian émigrés, about the sources of money that paid for the Brexit campaign, and about the dubious activities of Conservative Friends of Russia.
If the Minister is going to dismiss all that as conspiracy theories or smears and say that it has nothing to do with the delay of the report, I say back to him: prove it. Publish this report and let us see for ourselves. Otherwise, there is only question: what have you got to hide?

Stella Creasy: Thank you, Mr Speaker—it has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?
We all in the House will know from our email inboxes that one of the challenges facing our current politics is that people watch too much Netflix and so are convinced that there are many conspiracies. That said, given that, as ISC members have said, many foxes have been set lose—reports about Sergey Nalobin, about Dominic Cumming’s security clearance, about Alexander Temerko’s friendship with the Prime Minister, about the use of the Lycamobile offices; given that the security agencies say they are happy to see the report, which the Government have had since March, published; given the cross-party support for it to be published; and given that Earl Howe in the House of Lords yesterday said it is the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister alone who needs to publish it, does the Minister recognise that the best way to kill the conspiracy theories is to put it out in the open? Former Prime Ministers have told us that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Why has this Prime Minister closed the blinds?

Neil Coyle: Congratulations on your election, Mr Speaker.
We have heard from several Members of the ISC this afternoon, including three sat behind the Minister, and all have highlighted that every security agency required to do so has signed off this report, as has the Cabinet Office. The unprecedented delay is due to the Prime Minister. Is that because the Prime Minister is acting in the unprecedented fashion of subjugating national security to personal and political interests and his loyalty to Dominic Cummings, a man already found to be in contempt of Parliament?

Julian Smith: I could not agree more.
I thank my colleague Lord Duncan of Springbank, Lord Hain and other noble lords and baronesses for their work in the other place last week. Many Members in the Chamber today have played a role in making today’s debate happen, particularly DUP Members, the hon. Member for North Down (Lady Hermon), the Chairman and members of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee and many, many more.
The desire and push from Northern Ireland has been significant. On Sunday night, a number of members of the Government received a letter from a Catholic priest who represents the diocese of Down and Connor, which was the location of two of the children’s homes at the centre of the inquiry. He said that it is
“a matter of deep personal shame for me and for the diocese that both homes were found by the inquiry to have fundamentally failed the children in their care, enabling regimes of horrific and systemic emotional, physical and sexual abuse of children, as well as neglect. In the period before the inquiry, I came to know some of the former residents of these homes and publicly supported them in their calls for justice and an inquiry. Over the years of the inquiry and since, I have watched as those who led this campaign and the hundreds of former children in care who took part in the inquiry relived the horrors of their time in these institutions and the abuse they suffered there. As children they arrived at these homes frightened, disorientated and with the simple hope of every child that the adults in their lives would respond to them with affection, understanding, tenderness and care. Instead, they were met so often with hard-hearted coldness, harsh regimes, sterile routine and lovelessness, as well as indescribable sexual and physical abuse. It is difficult to overstate the suffering that the former residents of these homes have endured and continue to endure as a result of their experience.”
On the final day of one of the most divided Parliaments in British political history, we can say, hand on heart, that we have all come together, worked together and pulled together to deliver this Bill.

Julian Smith: We have begun a project management team between the Northern Ireland Office and the Northern Ireland civil service. I know that David Sterling and the Executive Office have spent time this week looking at how things can be accelerated, but I wish both to acknowledge the need to move quickly and to recognise the fact that this will take a bit of time. We need to get this legislation through, and then we need to get on with how we can press forward with this.
I want to pay tribute to the victims groups that I have engaged with over these past few months and that have engaged with my predecessors and other political leaders: Survivors North West, Survivors Together, the Rosetta Trust, and SAVIA—Survivors and Victims of Institutional Abuse. They have campaigned on behalf of the people they represent with strength and dignity. Many victims are old and ill. They have not only had their childhood and lives blighted, but they have had to wait, year after year, for the child abuse and what happened to them to be recognised.
At each meeting with the victims’ groups at Stormont House, I noticed that Jon McCourt from Survivors North West had a small battered copy of the Hart report laid on the table in front of him. There was huge hope and trust in that copy of the report that there might finally be acknowledgement for what he and his friends had had done to them as children. Jon has held that copy of the report close, gripping it tightly for three long years, meeting politician after politician, civil servant after civil servant—anyone who could make a difference in getting redress. The battered cover of Jon’s report, once blue, has now faded. That report contains the grimmest details of the twisted blows laid on the hope and innocence of the children taken into care in Northern Ireland at different times over much of the 20th century.  It details how the Kincora hostel in Belfast was completely captured by three child abusers for the same number of decades, leaving them free to anally rape and masturbate at will those boys they were meant to protect.
The report details the impact of the child migrant scheme to Australia. Witness HIA 324 describes his experiences in his statement, as follows:
“My life in institutions has had a profound impact on me. I have always wondered what it would be like to have had a family—a mother and father and brothers and sisters. I never got the chance to find out because I was sent to Australia. We were exported to Australia like little baby convicts. It is hard to understand why they did it… I still cannot get over the fact that I was taken away from a family I never got the chance to know. I was treated like an object, taken from one place to another… I have a nightmare every night of my life. I relive my past and am happy when daylight comes.”
HIA 324 was born in 1938 and was 75 when he spoke those words to the inquiries team in Perth in 2013, but he died before he could sign his statement.
The Hart report highlights how the congregations that supported the four Sisters of Nazareth homes were well aware of the physical and emotional abuse happening in those homes, but did nothing to stop it. The report details how the Sisters of Nazareth would regularly conceal or ignore the presence of the sisters or brothers of those children in their care, hiding them from them. The report details the assault of girls in Nazareth House, with one case in which a girl had her head banged against white tiles for not washing properly. She recalled that there was blood all over the white tiles, and she suffered hearing problems afterwards.
The report details how the Norbertine Order, and then diocese after diocese, failed to stop Father Smyth, a known abuser, from travelling the length and breadth of Northern Ireland and Ireland, abusing hundreds of children. The report confirmed that at Rubane House, boys were sexually abused throughout the four decades that the home operated. It was not just sexual abuse; page after page of the report details the bullying, the use of Jeyes fluid and the confidence attacks on menstruating girls and on young children who wet their beds. The report outlines failure after failure by statutory authorities and the Government to ask the right questions, to show basic levels of care, or to follow up on the condition of those children sent thousands of miles away to Australia.
The Bill, which we hope to pass today, cannot undo the acts perpetrated on the victims, and it does not extend to the other areas of the UK that are currently being addressed by the child abuse inquiry here in London and a similar inquiry in Scotland, but it will show to Northern Ireland victims that action has been taken, and I hope that in a short time similar action can be taken, through legislation, for the rest of the UK.
I started off by thanking the number of colleagues who have helped to get this Bill delivered today, those who have worked on the Hart report and those who have worked to support this legislation, but this is not our Bill; it is the Bill of the victims and survivors, and of their representatives, some of whom are present today. For anyone involved at whatever stage, it has been a humbling experience to work with Northern Ireland victims and survivors who suffered child abuse while in care. The resilience and humanity of the victims should drive us all in our daily responsibility to every child, whether through our families, our work, our responsibilities or our communities.
Victims were let down not just by the perpetrators and institutions, but by the Churches, councils and Governments who were meant to look after them—standing by, ignoring, not checking, turning a blind eye. People knew at the time. The De La Salle Order set down guidelines for the physical layout of its buildings to ensure that behaviour could be observed at all times—for example, on how windows should be placed in doors to ensure clear sight of what was going on in rooms:
“The Brother Director shall be careful that the parlour doors have glazed panels without curtains in such a manner that the interior may be easily seen.”
The ultimate legacy of the Northern Ireland victims and all child abuse victims, from the Hart report and from the Bill, must be for us all to ensure that we do everything within our power to protect children.
“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
Child abuse victims never had their full childhood and were then held hostage by the experiences that they had throughout their lives. I hope that the Bill goes some way towards providing Northern Ireland victims with redress, and for other victims throughout our country, I hope that their time for redress will come very soon. I commend the Bill to the House.

Steve Pound: I have to say that this is not an easy day to be in the House—it is not an easy time to hear the Secretary of State’s words—and I pay wholehearted tribute to him for quite simply one of the most powerful speeches I have ever heard in my 22 years on these Benches. He spoke from the heart and he spoke from a deep humanity. We have to pay tribute to him for those words, which were extraordinary and remarkable. Please God, may they provide a grain of comfort to some people who have suffered for so long.
It is also appropriate that we mention Sir Anthony Hart, who did an extraordinary amount of work. We must pay credit to him. I also pay credit to the Secretary of State’s predecessor, the right hon. Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley), who is present. She dedicated a huge amount of energy to this issue, as did her team and the Secretary of State’s team. I also pay credit to the Northern Ireland Office and the Northern Ireland civil service for the amount of work that has been done. How painful and agonising it must have been for them to have had to work in these circumstances. For me, to read the words is almost unimaginable, yet those to whom they refer are suffering a hundred times more than any of us could ever be.
As the Secretary of State said, the First Minister and Deputy First Minister agreed the terms of reference back on 31 May 2012; however, the inquiry goes back nearly 100 years, to 1922. Who can even begin to imagine the cavalcade of agony that has passed in those 100 years? Who can imagine those children whose bodies were broken, but whose hearts and spirits were also broken—who suffered in a way that, please God, we will never, ever have to contemplate again? When the Secretary of State quoted from St Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, it made me think about what the victims thought as children. What did those children think of the adult world—the place of safety that they were being  taken to? What did those children think? As adults, did they have any trust, faith or belief in the base humanity, having faced that?
Today, we are undertaking a unique piece of legislation. There has never been a Bill like this on the Floor of the House—it has never happened in this way before. It is absolutely right and appropriate that we take extraordinary, unusual steps, because this is such an extraordinary occasion. We must place on record, here and now, our determination that this will never, ever happen again. Every one of us, be we lay, be religious, be we politicians—whomsoever we be, anyone of us who has any contact with children’s services must make absolutely sure and swear in our heart of hearts that we will never, ever walk by on the other side of the road. We should never, ever be those people who turned a blind eye, as we heard in the agonising statement from the priest that was read out earlier.
We cannot make it right—we cannot repair those broken hearts and broken bodies—but by doing what we will today, by offering some form of redress, some form of compensation, we will hopefully allow closure. We will hopefully be able to say that this House has heard. The right hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Sir Jeffrey M. Donaldson) spoke magnificently earlier about the way the House has risen. When we think of some of the activities that take place in this House, today’s statement shows in sharp relief some of the things that happen here that are less noble—that are often ignoble. Today, the House has risen to a higher standard. It is entirely appropriate that is on this occasion that we have risen.
There are many questions still to be asked. This is still a draining emotional occasion. We should pay tribute, once and for all, to the right hon. Secretary of State for the footwork he has shown. It is unheard of for legislation to come through in this way. As recently as last week, we heard that the Whips Office would not allow it and it was not going to happen, yet somehow, with the involvement of the Government, the Opposition, officials, civil servants and even the palace, the Bill has come to the House and will go through.
Let us thank Brendan McAllister, the interim advocate, for the work that he has done. Let us follow up on some of the interventions that have been made already by right hon. and hon. Members representing Northern Ireland parties, and let us take the opportunity to say that this is one of the rare occasions when the House comes together, regardless of our party and of any form of religious, political or social affiliation. We are as one in this House in swearing that this cannot happen again, this must not happen again and the victims must get redress, must get compensation, must get respect and, please God, must get closure on this.
The behaviour of politicians of all parties and of all communities in Northern Ireland has been exemplary. I know how difficult it is. I have met victims groups, as has the Secretary of State. To sit in a room opposite someone describing the most appalling nightmare—a nightmare that is hard for any human being to envisage—is an experience that none of us came into politics to undergo, yet it is right that we came into politics to resolve this horror and this agony. I cannot say too much about how impressed I was by the victims groups   that I met. Their courage and bravery is astounding. I hope—I know—that all Members in this House feel the same way and say with one voice how much respect we have for them.
I hope that some of the technical questions that were asked earlier by right hon. and hon. Members from Northern Ireland can be addressed. The question of the speed of the recompense payments is, of course, an issue to be resolved. It would be marvellous if some indication could be given to the victims before Christmas—it would be wonderful if they at least had some idea about what was happening. In addition, we would like to know when the staff will be in place for the redress board. It is important to say that we have to establish the bureaucracy, if it has not already been established.
I noticed that no additional resources were allocated in the recent Budget. Does that mean that they will actually come within the next financial year? Following the question from the hon. Member for South Antrim (Paul Girvan), will they come from this year’s budget, or will there be some additional funding mechanism? Those are technical questions. In some ways, they are almost otiose in the context of what we have heard today. Technical questions, compensation and redress are important, but the single most important thing that we in this House do today is to pay credit and tribute to the victims, to their families and to their relatives, and to say that politics in the past may have let them down, but today, politics and this House will not let them down. We will respect them, we will cherish them and we will do everything—everything—we can to ensure that they finally receive the redress that they so deserve.

Emma Little Pengelly: I am so very glad that we are here today and that we are getting to the final stage of this process. It has been a battle throughout, not least for the many victims and survivors of this terrible abuse. It has even been a battle just to get this legislation through the House today, and I pay tribute to everybody who has worked incredibly hard get us to this point. My colleagues and I, other parties, the victims and others across Northern Ireland have lobbied incredibly hard to get this legislation through, and I am really grateful and glad that we have been able to achieve that. At times we expressed frustration and anger that these provisions were potentially not going to go through the House, but the Secretary of State did his best and succeeded, and we see the evidence of that today. This Bill will go through the House in exceptional circumstances, with so many people across so many different elements of the system having worked to make this happen, and I am so very glad—not for us, but for the victims and survivors of this dreadful abuse.
I am glad that those who have suffered through this process will be able to see the genuine care and empathy of all Members who have spoken on the issue thus far. The Secretary of State made a wonderful speech that was very much from the heart, and we could see that. I hope that the victims and survivors get some comfort from the fact that many people care deeply about this issue. I also pay tribute to the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound). Once again, he made a beautiful and poignant speech that was truly from the heart. That will be picked up, heard and listened to by the victims and survivors, and I hope that it gives them some comfort.

Ian Paisley Jnr: When the Secretary of State made his poignant remarks to the House today, he quoted from Corinthians on the views and perspective of a child—what children see. The beginning of that chapter says that faith is so powerful that it can move mountains, but without charity, compassion and love, it is nothing. This House today, through the actions of this Government that have been brought here, has demonstrated that through compassion it has been able to move bureaucratic mountains. It has been able to move those things that stood in the way, and it is not as nothing; today this House is something. It has done something incredibly powerful and incredibly important for victims across Northern Ireland, those here on the  mainland, and, indeed, those who are located across the world as a result of the abuse that took place in these locations in Northern Ireland.
It is important that the Secretary of State is able to set out, and this legislation sets out, the schedule of when moneys will be paid, because that is a practical issue. It is also important that we make sure that help is given to the victims’ groups going forward from now on, because they have been brought to the top of the mountain. Today is, if I can use the word appropriately, an exciting day in that they have now achieved this, but there will then be the cliff edge of what happens next. Those victims’ groups will have to be wrapped in compassion, charity, help and assistance so that they can then move to the next phase of this, because it is not going to end very quickly. There will probably now be a process put in place, and it is important that practical help is given to take the groups through that to make sure that they can get the other end of this as quickly and expeditiously as possible. I hope that we will see that. I hope that we mark this very poignant and historic day with an appropriate mark of respect and an appropriate celebration that this House is not as nothing; it has achieved something today.

Julian Smith: I will do whatever I can, within the constraints of the purdah period, to update right hon. and hon. Members and the public.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley) referred to the fact that this legislation is the most robust basis for the redress scheme and the commissioner. That is worth reiterating. It would not be on as sound a footing if we had not got what we hoped to get today, so she is absolutely right. She is also right to point to the fact that hopefully after the election we can get the Executive and the Assembly going, because that is the best place to do all NI legislation.
The hon. Member for Belfast South (Emma Little Pengelly) was very clear about how productive the Northern Ireland Assembly and the Executive had been around the time of the Hart report, and on other issues. That period gives us all hope that we will get back to a position where we will restore the Executive and the Assembly.
My hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley) made an extremely valid point. It is something I was worrying about last night as I re-read parts of the report. There are many, many people of different ages—people who may not have been in care but may have been abused in other settings—who will no doubt be the subject of reports going forward.
I thank all colleagues for all their kind remarks, and again pay tribute to the victims’ groups who are sitting here today. They may have missed their current flights, but we have arranged for them to be able to go later. I hope we will all be able to celebrate with them shortly.
Question put and agreed to.
Bill accordingly read a Second time.
Motion made and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 63(2), That the Bill be committed to a Committee of the whole House.—(Maggie Throup.)
Bill considered in Committee.
[Dame Rosie Winterton in the Chair]
Clauses 1 to 34 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Schedules 1 and 2 agreed to.
The Deputy Speaker resumed the Chair.
Bill reported, without amendment.
Third Reading

Julian Smith: I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.
That was, I think, one of the shortest Committee stages in this Parliament’s history. Having been Government Chief Whip, I only wish that another policy area of this Government could have been covered so quickly.
As has been said during the course of this debate, in powerful speeches from Members across the House, this is a day for victims—the victims from Northern Ireland who are in the Public Gallery today, the victims from Northern Ireland who are sitting at home, and all victims of child abuse who are yet to have redress and a full acknowledgment of what they went through. I am extremely grateful to the House for all the support and for all the civil service support, and I think this is a very fitting way to finish this Parliament.

Patrick McLoughlin: I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman. As I said, it was an incredibly rewarding period.
Within a few days or weeks of being there, I found myself having to phone Richard Branson to explain why his company was going to keep the franchise for the west coast main line, although he had previously been told that Virgin had lost it; that conversation I remember well. I would like to say at this point that it is fair to say that people such as Richard Branson and Brian Souter have done more for rail passengers in this country than many Secretaries of State, and they have improved our railways in a very dramatic way. I hope that, whatever plans come in the manifestos, we do not lose the involvement of the private sector in the railways. They have transformed our railways, and I think that is partly as a result of the private investment we have seen.
I would like to take this opportunity, if I may, to pay tribute to some of the superb civil servants who supported me in my role. Among them, in my private office were Mark Reach and Rupert Hetherington, as well as Philip Rutnam, who was the permanent secretary for all the time that I was there, while Phil West was my principal private secretary for the entire four years I was at the Department. I had excellent special advisers—another often misunderstood role—in Ben Mascall, Simon Burton and Tim Smith, as well as a constituent of mine, Julian Glover, who knew more about the railways than anybody I have come across and would give me the history and everything else. He has written and had published not so long ago a book on Thomas Telford, “Man of Iron”,  and it is great authoritative writing. People such as them who bring outside expertise straight into the political arena are really very important.
I was encouraged by the unswerving support of the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, who were both great infrastructure enthusiasts—so much so that one of my problems as Transport Secretary was that, when visiting a construction site, I was always third in line to get a hi-vis jacket and a hard hat. In 2015 I was reappointed by the Prime Minister. I remember him saying, “Patrick, you’ve been going up and down the country promising all these schemes.” I pointed out that I had only done so after he had promised them in the first place, and that it would have been difficult to row back on promises made by the Prime Minister.
Talking about infrastructure, one of the fascinating aspects of returning to the Department where I began my ministerial career was that I could appreciate fully just how long and difficult these major projects are. Crossrail is a good example. When I was first in the Department, in 1989, I remember the then Secretary of State saying, “We’re going to build Crossrail.” It is now being built. It has been delayed and gone over budget, but it will make a tremendous difference to London once it is finished.
That brings me to High Speed 2. HS2 is not about speed; it is about capacity. It is about building a modern railway that is fit for our times and for a modern country. I could spend a long time talking about HS2, but I think that might try the patience of my right hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Sir David Lidington), which I do not want to do. I accept the problems that he and his constituents face as a result of HS2, and those concerns must be listened to. However, I will find it ironic if I can take a high-speed train from London to Brussels or Paris, but not to Birmingham, Manchester or Leeds. It is absolutely essential that we increase our capacity.
As we prepare to leave the European Union, I well recall the Cabinet meeting on the Saturday morning after David Cameron had returned from the negotiations —given that he has written about this in his book, I can now break the rule not to speak about Cabinet discussions. I said in that meeting, “I would love to live in Utopia, but the trouble is that I would wake up and find that the EU was still there.” We have to be realistic about what we want from Europe. We are leaving the European Union, and it is right that we do so—we said that we would be bound by the result of the referendum, and I strongly believe that—but it is the European Union that we are leaving, not Europe. We must make sure that we get a good trading relationship with the rest of Europe as quickly as possible.
I will still be living in Derbyshire Dales. I shall miss tremendously being its Member of Parliament and being at the centre of things there. I am sure that I will still enjoy the company of so many good people, but it will be a different relationship. After 33 years, it is time to move on.
One of my greatest supporters and helpers has been my wife. It is fair to say that she has always been my strongest supporter in public—in private, she has often told me the truth, and I have been the better for it. I first entered the House in a by-election, and it was chaotic; after six weeks of campaigning, I arrived here in the thick of it. I decided only last week not to seek re-election,  and I have to say that my departure feels the same. One of the best pieces of advice that my wife ever gave me was when she was helping me with a speech that I was preparing. After typing it up, she looked at me and said, “Patrick, I’ve never known you to make too short a speech.” On that note, I want to end by thanking everyone, including all the officers and staff, for their help.

Kevin Barron: I rise to make my final contribution after more than 36 years in this House. As I said when I announced that I was standing down, it has been the honour of my life to represent Rother Valley, a constituency that I first moved to at the age of eight, when my father, a Durham miner, moved to the south Yorkshire coalfields.
Having been elected in 1983, my baptism came very shortly after, when 4,500 miners went on strike for 12 months. With the Orgreave coke works in my constituency, I was kept on my toes. That was followed by three years as the Parliamentary Private Secretary to the then Leader of the Opposition. I learnt quite a lot of things that I will not be sharing this afternoon—I am not even tempted to talk about the Whips Office, as the right hon. Member for Derbyshire Dales (Sir Patrick McLoughlin) has just done.
The major work that I have done in the House is with Select Committees. When I was first elected, I served on the Energy Committee, and then for a short time, I was a member of the Environment Committee. I chaired the Health Committee for five years, from 2005 to 2010. One of the earliest things that Committee did was to secure a free vote in the House on bringing in a comprehensive ban on smoking in public places. Some people said at the time that it would be the end of the world as we knew it, but now people say that it is the most popular piece of public health legislation that the House has ever introduced. I spent eight years chairing the Committee on Standards, until September last year. We did not have quite as great a result as we did with the smoking ban, but my intention all along was to ensure that this place was better thought of by the people outside who elect and send us here. I think that to some extent we were moving along quite nicely on that, until something happened in 2016 that seems to have knocked us back quite a bit. Select Committee work is something that I have enjoyed.
With regard to local achievements, clearly there are many, but the main achievement that I and my staff have had over many years is dealing with individual casework, for the people who come along and need help, perhaps because they have been unable to communicate their concerns. I have always said that I have been a voice for the voiceless in Rother Valley, speaking up on their behalf. Another thing I have been involved with in the constituency is coalfield regeneration. The advanced manufacturing park is now in the Rotherham constituency, but it used to be in Rother Valley when it was first put in by a Labour Government. It shows that we are recognised as having some of the finest manufacturing anywhere in the world. That came out of the old Orgreave coke works and the coalmine site. Such developments have transformed parts of south Yorkshire, and my voice and that of the Government were there for that on many occasions.
Finally, I want to say a few words of thanks to some individuals. For the last eight general elections, my friend and colleague Alan Goy has been my political agent. All Members will know how important it is to have a good relationship with their political agent. I also want to thank the staff who have supported me during my tenure. I will thank, in particular, my current staff, Sheena Woolley, Jacquie Falvey and Natalie Robinson, who support me in the constituency, and Kate Edwards and Michael Denoual, who work here in Parliament.
As the right hon. Member for Derbyshire Dales said, your wife is a massive support in this job. Sadly, I lost my first wife Carol in 2008, but Andree, who I married a few years ago, has been a pillar of support. It would be difficult for anybody to do this job without that type of support at home.
I do not want to turn this into a full-scale Oscars speech, so I will end by thanking the people of Rother Valley, who I have been honoured to represent. Whoever wins the seat at the election, I hope that they will feel the same satisfaction representing it that I have felt for many years.

Ed Vaizey: I am grateful to have an opportunity to take part in this debate and to pay tribute to so many colleagues who are moving on. It is a particular honour to follow my right hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire Dales (Sir Patrick McLoughlin). Indeed, it was a telephone call from him that first heralded my appointment as a Minister. I could hear the deep reluctance in his voice, verging on disbelief, as he announced that the Prime Minister had appointed me. He then had a moment of fun at my expense when he told me—he obviously knew me very well—that I was off to the Ministry of Agriculture, before revealing that I was in fact going to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. In fact, things went from bad to worse after that phone call, because my sole contribution, apart from irritating the Chief Whip during my first five years in this place while on the Opposition Benches, was to write a blog in which, with the oncoming age of austerity, I recommended that the first thing we should do as a Government was to get rid of Government cars. Straight after my right hon. Friend put down the phone, my new private secretary at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport rang me—I felt tremendously important— and said, “Minister, would you like to come into the Department?” I said that, yes, of course I would. They said, “Minister, shall we send your car?” I paused for a moment. I thought of myself, as I have always been in this place, as a man of great principle and then said, “Yes, please send a car.” [Laughter.] Two minutes later, there was another phone call: “Minister, the Secretary of State has read your blog and he has cancelled your car.” I never had a car for the six years that I was in the Department.
My right hon. Friend’s speech also reminded me of my own glittering political career in this place. I have always wanted to do the Queen’s Speech address, so that I can recount to the House some of my great political successes. Standing in 1997 in Bristol East, I managed to turn a 5,000 Labour majority into a 17,000 Labour majority. Then, when I was selected to succeed Robert Jackson in the seat of Wantage, he and I worked hand in glove together for three years—father and son, Laurel  and Hardy—with never a moment apart. After working with me for those three years, Robert Jackson turned around and defected to the Labour party.
I was lucky enough to succeed Robert Jackson in 2005 to become the Member of Parliament for Wantage and Didcot, and it is a tremendous privilege. I rechristened the constituency Wantage and Didcot, although I can never get that past the Boundary Commission. Didcot is the largest town in the constituency, which also includes Wantage, Faringdon and Wallingford. I sensed from my right hon. Friend’s speech that all of us in this House believe that we represent the best constituency in the country. The great advantage of Wantage is that it literally does have everything, from an ancient white horse to a 21st century space cluster with 90 start-up companies. It has Europe’s leading business park, Milton Park, a technology business park with life sciences, the European Space Agency, the Satellite Applications Catapult, Williams Formula 1, farming, small businesses and a huge sense of community. I think the one thing we all learn in this place as Members of Parliament, if we did not learn it beforehand, is the tremendous power of community and social organisations in our constituencies. Again and again, we know the tremendous amount of work that volunteers do in every part of society in our constituencies to make things happen and to make them work, often with very little thanks or recognition.
My constituency—I hope this does not sound arrogant or come out in the wrong way—suffers in different ways from other constituencies, in that it suffers from the problems of success. The issues that come across my desk relate to economic success: concern about the growing number of houses and whether there is adequate infrastructure, such as roads and schools, to support it. There are other important issues, such as reopening a provincial railway station, Grove station, to provide better commuting for all my constituents, and sorting out the problems at Wantage community hospital. The biggest issue that faces us is how to cope with the impact of economic success in this area.
I just want to touch on two other topics before I sit down. I probably should not bring up Brexit—we were all having such a lovely time before I did—but I just want to put on record, as someone who has got into a bit of trouble on this issue, what happened. I supported the Prime Minister’s position when he first became Prime Minister, to leave with a deal, otherwise we would leave with no deal. Funnily enough, I thought the no-deal threat was better aimed at this Parliament, rather than at Europe. It was only the out-of-the-blue Prorogation that made me feel that Parliament should have a moment where it put in an insurance policy to ensure that we did get a deal, but once a deal came back I was very happy to support it. I was happy to support the programme motion, and I hope that if the Prime Minister comes back with a majority, he brings the deal back and rams it through. I would certainly support him in that. I am not a remainer or a remoaner; I am a leaver-with-a-dealer. I hope that that is what can happen after the election.
Although I lost the Whip, I am a fan and an admirer of the Prime Minister. I have known him for many years. Generally, every single political prediction I make is wrong, but I did predict two years ago that he would  become Prime Minister. I also said that, looking at his record as Mayor of London, he would make a fine Prime Minister. I think he will. As I look at my right hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton (Sir Alan Duncan), I can see him nodding in agreement.

Ed Vaizey: The final issue I want to raise in my speech is that, despite the then Chief Whip’s concerns, I was lucky enough to serve for six years as Minister with responsibility for the arts, telecommunications and technology. The telecoms part of the brief was a complete accident. It came to us when we were in opposition, because the then telecoms spokesman was the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke). When it was pointed out that he did not even own a mobile phone, my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Surrey (Mr Hunt) rather deftly stole the policy and took it over to DCMS. When I got that Department, the then Prime Minister had such faith in me that he tried to take the telecoms brief away from me and give it to my hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose). Thankfully, he was married to a woman who was the chief executive of a telecoms company at the time, so I held on to that fantastic brief, as well as that of the creative industries of film, television, advertising and video games. I just want to say two things about those two areas.
First, the arts are tremendously important. We have the most incredible arts ecology. That is a terrible word to use for such a beautiful subject, but we have the most incredible museums and arts institutions in this country. I think it really is only in this place that they are not appreciated. When I go abroad, people marvel at our museums and how we support the arts in this country. If only we could have a system similar to the system we have for international development, where the arts have a guaranteed budget—not 0.7%, but bigger than it is at the moment—we would get so much more from them. We already get such a tremendous amount.
On the creative industries, we perhaps like to mock luvvies but that is completely wrong. One of the reasons we have not dipped into recession in the past couple of quarters is the contribution made by the British film industry. I told the then Prime Minister that he had as much right to appear on the set of James Bond as at a widget factory, because it was making a massive economic contribution to our country.
On technology, we are the leaders of Europe in technology investment, start-ups and technology companies. As we move towards delivering Brexit, I urge all policy makers in this House, when Parliament returns, to look at technology as one of the key areas that will drive the 21st century post-European Union British economy.

Kate Hoey: I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman knows that he has to be re-elected, of course, but he is not retiring. [Interruption.] Now I am very unclear whether he is retiring or just putting himself forward for re-election—fine.
Like the right hon. Member for Derbyshire Dales (Sir Patrick McLoughlin), who spoke first in the debate, I came in at a by-election in 1989. I will not go through my whole history, but I just point out that it is very different being a Member of Parliament who is literally five minutes away from their constituency. He was my constituent in Kennington for a very long time and he took a great interest in many of the community events; I am very grateful for that. Coming in as a new Member in that by-election back in 1989 was very different: we had no television covering the house, no mobile phones, no emails, no 24-hour news—it all sounds wonderful now. Members who come in now probably do not really understand how different it was 30 years ago.
Some of the improvements have been wonderful. For example, I waited for an office for a very long time. All the things that are now done for new Members did not happen then and we were very much left to find our own way. I should also say that I do not like some of the changes. I am very pleased that we have a new Speaker who will be extremely fair and show the kindness—quite honestly, I am not a hypocrite—that the previous Speaker did not show to Members, and I hope that the new Parliament will realise that some changes from the so-called modernisation do not necessarily change the standard of the debate in this place or the way that people behave. I think we need to look at that very carefully, and I hope that the new Speaker will do so. There is not just the question of clapping. Practically every tradition in this House has been introduced over the years for a reason. I remember being one of those people who came in and immediately said, “Why are we wasting so much time in the Division Lobbies? Why are we not getting through right away? Why are we not able to not vote in a different way?” However, I would not dream of voting to get rid of the Division Lobbies now, because it is such a useful time to talk to people from both sides of the House—if someone is not always voting with their party, as I have not been a few times—and to see Members from our own party. I spent most evenings going over to Vauxhall to community meetings, friends groups and tenants associations, so I did not have the luxury of being able to stay around in the House and have lots of nice meals, with the wonderful catering staff and wonderful food. We need to be careful about modernising this place so much that it is treated in a way that loses the absolute value of history that we have in this place.
One part of my life that will be very unhappy about me leaving is my wonderful, old, traditional, original Mini, because it literally knows its way from the House of Commons over Westminster bridge and back over Lambeth bridge. Some days I would do the journey  perhaps two or three times, so my Mini will get a great rest when I leave, and it will not know what has hit it now that it will not be doing that journey.
I want to say a couple of very important thank yous. This place is made up of people who work so hard for us all and who very often do not get the thanks and tributes. I thank all the members of the Royal Mail, for example—the postmen and women who have delivered our mail and have been so kind over the years. I thank Yiannis in the Travel Office, who has been fantastic. Most importantly for me, as someone who came in and was not in any way computer-savvy—I still do not really like technology—one person in the Digital Service, Balj Rai, has been just wonderful. He knows exactly how to be patient with someone like me, and I thank him.
Finally, I want to thank my personal staff. I have had Kathy Duffy working for me for 26 years—I must not get emotional; this is silly. I have had Max Freedman for 15 years; Lara Nicholson for 11 years; Ada During for six years; and my wonderful paralegal Ashleah Skinner, who has done a brilliant job, for four years. They have all made my life here so much better. I also thank all my constituents who have sent me such wonderful letters and shown kindness. I will not miss many of my party political activists, but I will miss my constituents, my community organisers and the people who really wanted to work with me to make Vauxhall a better place. One thing I said when I came in here was that my country would always come before my party—and it still does.

Michael Fallon: I am most grateful to my hon. Friend. It seemed to me incredibly important to keep the confidence of the House, having won its support back in 2015 for airstrikes in Iraq and then for their extension to Syria. Of course, that we were able to keep that confidence was down in no small part to the precision of our pilots and their skill in difficult conditions in minimising civilian casualties.
My successor will inherit a thriving and prosperous constituency. My constituents enjoy a good quality of life, remarkably low unemployment, a wide choice of schooling, frequent rail connections to the capital and the protection of the green belt—over 90% of my constituency is green belt—but there is still work to be done, including on the regeneration of Swanley, one of the other towns in my constituency, especially through new investment and the promise of a fast link service from Maidstone and Otford through Swanley to the city of London.
We also need to ensure that boys in my constituency have access to grammar school places. Whether you like it or not, Kent offers an 11-plus system, but Sevenoaks was the only district in Kent that did not have any grammar school places. I was delighted that after a 15-year campaign we managed to establish a girls’ school annexe, which has been open now for a couple of years, but we still need to ensure provision for boys’ grammar school places alongside it. We also need to continue to protect our green-belt protections in Sevenoaks. The Government’s unrealistic housing targets will put  pressure on that green belt, though I know that my hon. Friends on the Front Bench are conscious of the need to balance the demand for new housing with our commitments to protect the green belt.
I hope that this election campaign will not ignore some of the longer-term challenges our country faces. We have spent an awful lot of time—perhaps rightly, perhaps wrongly—debating the withdrawal agreement. In the end, that agreement only dealt with Ireland, our payments into the EU budget and the rights of EU citizens; we have not started yet on the major negotiation that really matters for business and jobs in my constituency, which is our future trading relationship, and I fear we have not yet started to explain to our electors some of the trade-offs that will inevitably be involved as we come to deal with the challenge to agriculture, financial services, the aerospace and automotive industries and our fisheries, and accommodating their legitimate right and desire to trade freely with the European continent with the views of our partners.
We will have to quickly put in place the security partnership that has long been promised in various documents the Government have issued—I fear we have spoken far too little about this—and make sure there is no cliff edge at the end of January or February in the policing and judicial arrangements that our constituents expect and in the way our agencies work with other agencies across the European continent to deal with terrorism and organised crime. We will also need to work with our former partners in the EU to continue to uphold the rules-based international order. We do not debate foreign affairs nearly enough in this House. When I first entered Parliament, in the ’80s, we had much more regular debates on international affairs.
We are dealing with a resurgent Russia that is in breach of many international conventions, whether on nuclear arms, chemical weapons or the protection of sovereignty under the Helsinki accords. We are dealing with a very ambitious China that is flouting the law of the sea convention, which it has signed, and continues to steal—there is no other word for it—the world’s intellectual property. And we are dealing with a mercantilist United States that is degrading the World Trade Organisation and slapping sanctions even on its friends in pursuit of a policy of “America first”. When it comes to holding the rules-based international system together, there really is a role for the leadership among the western nations, and particularly for our own nation here in the United Kingdom.
Let me end by thanking all those who have helped me so much over the last 31 years, particularly the staff in my office.

Ann Clwyd: Thank you very much. Yes, I remember our first few days here. If you come in in a by-election, it is always more difficult to assimilate. I am glad that my hon. Friend is still here. I have not always agreed it with him, as he well knows, but I respect him for his diligence and persistence, because those are two things that a Member of Parliament needs to do: to be diligent and persistent, and not to give up.
One of the things I have been keen on doing is the promotion and protection of international human rights, and I have given my long-standing support to people in other countries, in the middle east, Turkey, Cambodia and East Timor. We always have arguments in this place about the arms trade, and I do hope that we are ultra-careful in future about who we sell arms to. One sadness for me is that we did not manage to get a report out in the last Session of Parliament on arms sales to Saudi Arabia. A sustained and strategic use of the parliamentary mandate and platform is therefore crucial to furthering causes and ensuring that the Government of the day are being properly scrutinised. Parliamentary questions and debates are important, and I found out that I have spoken in debates in the House 2,200 times. That is a useless fact, but somebody produced it today.
A friend of mine in the House of Lords, Baroness Quin, phoned me a short time ago. She was in the European Parliament with me, and she reminded me of various things. She and I were in Senegal for a women’s rights conference—I do not know how many years ago—and suddenly there was a phone call for Joyce Quin to say that Captain Kent Kirk had landed on the coastline of her constituency to protest about fishing rights. Joyce was getting phone calls all the time from her constituents, who had no idea she was in Senegal. Of course, very often our constituents did not realise that part of our work was travelling to other countries and contributing to debates there.
I have been committed to cross-party scrutiny through my long-term engagement with the International Development Committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee  and the Committee on Arms Export Controls. I have also chaired the all-party parliamentary human rights group for many years, which has allowed me to work with colleagues from all over the world from across the political spectrum to raise awareness of serious human rights violations and breaches of international humanitarian law, as well as giving victims a voice and supporting them in getting reform and redress. Human rights is thereby depoliticised, as it should be. Some colleagues have also worked on the executive of the Joint Committee on Human Rights.
I have supported the work of the Inter Parliamentary Union. We do not talk enough in this place about the IPU, particularly the British group, which enables me and fellow BGIPU members to communicate concerns, including human rights, when countries sometimes have to be called out. We build greater consensus on big issues and crises facing the world, such as climate change, international development, poverty alleviation and the refugee crisis. I pay tribute to the staff and secretariat of the IPU and highlight the work of its committee on the human rights of parliamentarians, which I have chaired several times and of which I was a long-time member. My vision for the Cynon Valley, the UK and the international community is unfinished business, a lot of it, as far as I am concerned.
Most of all, I thank people in the House for their friendship, comradeship and support. I mean all sections of the House, particularly the doorkeepers, because when I was hobbling around on my new knee, I had great assistance from them. In fact, I got quite to rely on them. They gave me every help and they still do, even when I say “No, I'm all right now, thank you. I can get to the back row now, so you do not need to help me any more.” Particularly to all my colleagues and friends, I want to say that this has been a great place for building friendships. I thank you all and I am very sorry to be leaving you all.

Adrian Bailey: I rise to give my final speech in the House. I stress that, notwithstanding the difficulties of the politics and the role of Parliament at this moment, my reasons for standing down are essentially personal. I have been here for 19 years, but it does not seem a minute since I gave my maiden speech. My enthusiasm for politics is undiminished and my commitment to the values that have always driven my political activity is still there. However, my birth certificate and the fact that last year I had to have a second hip replacement are timely reminders that we cannot always take for granted that we will have time available to do everything else that we want to do in life that, unfortunately, being here precludes us from doing. I have therefore made the decision to move on.
Before I talk about more general issues, I would like to express a few thanks, as other Members have done. First, I wish to thank my constituency and its electors for re-electing me six times. I am a strong pro-Europe remainer. My constituency voted 70% for Brexit, but their undiminished support for me is both a reflection of the broadness of the views they have on many things and perhaps a salutary warning to the Prime Minister on his election strategy. I have been privileged to represent a genuinely multicultural constituency, one that is heavily industrialised. Behind those often unprepossessing facades, there are small businesses that are at the cutting edge of our manufacturing technology and drive the revival in our civil aviation and motor industries, which has made us the pride of the world and contributed a huge amount to our economy.
I wish to thank my family. I want to start by thanking my wife Jill for her unstinting support. As the right hon. Member for Derbyshire Dales (Sir Patrick McLoughlin) said, such support is always there in public but it is often slightly more critical in private. Her support has always been valuable. I thank my stepson Danny, who always found me a complete embarrassment when he was a teenager. He is now a trade union organiser and a councillor to boot. I also want to thank my party for backing me all these years and the Co-operative party for its backing, too. I had a long spell as a Co-operative party organiser, and I have always been strongly committed to co-operative and mutual values. I am incredibly  grateful for the opportunity it gave me to work for the party and the backing it has given me here. In addition—not finally—I wish to thank Councillor Lorraine Ashman and Councillor Maria Crompton, who have been my assistants in West Bromwich for 19 and 18 years respectively. They are brilliant and their expertise is fantastic, and I know that, with the work they have done here for me, they have changed the lives of many individual electors in the constituency. I would like that recognised.
I said that my birth certificate told me it was time to go. That caused me to look back, and I realised that I have contested 10 parliamentary, one euro and five local government elections. I first worked in the 1964 election as a student Labour activist. I recall heckling Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Peter Walker, the father of the hon. Member for Worcester (Mr Walker)—I keep reminding him of that—and Jeremy Thorpe. I will come on to more about him in a moment. I first contested a parliamentary election when I was just 24, in South Worcestershire, against a character that older Members may remember, Sir Gerald Nabarro. I went on to contest Nantwich a couple of times in the 1974 elections, and then the Wirral by-election. That brings me to what is possibly a unique niche I have in political history: I have contested two by-elections nearly 25 years apart and both on the retirement of the Speaker. It was Selwyn Lloyd in 1976 and, of course, Betty Boothroyd in West Bromwich West in 2000. I have to say that I remember the West Bromwich election a lot more fondly than the Wirral one, because 1976 was not a good year for Labour. It was even worse for the Liberals, though, because it was the height of Jeremy Thorpe’s problems. I remember exchanging pleasantries with him over a loudspeaker when he came to speak for the Liberal candidate during the campaign. I think I halved the Liberal vote and doubled the Tory vote. A week later, Harold Wilson resigned; I have always felt a bit guilty that I was perhaps personally responsible.
When I first contested an election at 24 years old, I thought I would get into Parliament as a fairly young man, but unfortunately I ran into a couple of problems. First, I have always been fundamentally committed to Europe, and at that time, in the late ’70s and early ’80s, the Labour party was fundamentally opposed to it. Secondly, I was always a multilateralist at a time when the Labour party was committed to unilateralism. I realised that my parliamentary prospects were evaporating in front of me. However, I was then lucky to be employed by the Co-operative party. That movement gave me the opportunity to continue in politics, albeit in another capacity, to be my own person and to promote my own values and ideals, notwithstanding the fact that I could not do it in Parliament.
I remember an interesting occasion in 1981, during the big deputy leadership contest between Benn, Healey and Silkin. I was rung up and asked to go to Liverpool, Wavertree to speak on behalf of Denis Healey. Now, in common parlance, in political terms that is a bit of a hospital pass. The debate was dominated by Derek Hatton and the Militant Tendency. I was debating a representative for Tony Benn and a certain person by the name of Doug Hoyle, father of the current Speaker. I remember that my powers of oratory and persuasion enabled me to get exactly no votes—there were 12 abstentions.
I am running out of time so will move on and make a couple of quick observations. It has been an immense privilege to work here. I have seen how Parliament has  become more powerful vis-à-vis the Government. My five years as Chair of the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee was one of the most rewarding things I have done, and I want to see the powers of Select Committees enhanced, because they not only hold the Government to account but give the Government the insight into just how their policies are playing out on the ground, without the—shall we say—translation that comes from the layers of civil servants who advise their Ministers. Select Committees are a tremendous enhancement and a really valuable part of Parliament.
I wish to thank everybody. Despite the sharp and confrontational exchanges that take place, there is an underlying comradeship and community feeling among those here that I have always found valuable. I wish my successor and everybody who comes after me all the best with the difficult decisions they are going to have to make. I will still be out there, campaigning to promote the values I have always promoted. Thank you, everybody.

David Lidington: I will be the frank with the House: it will be a great wrench to leave this place after 27 years. You know what they say, Madam Deputy Speaker: folks are often kindest when they know you are on your way out, and there have been occasions in the past week since I announced my intention to step down when I have felt that I have been granted the privilege of attending my own funeral oration without the need to arrive in a hearse.
This afternoon, I wish to say a few brief words of thanks and to offer an expression of some hopes for the future of this place.
My chief thanks must go to my constituents in Aylesbury who have returned me as their Member of Parliament in seven successive general elections. I have to say that, when I was first selected and then elected, I was somewhat taken aback to read and research the tremendous history of my predecessors from John Hampden to Benjamin Disraeli, but prime among whom was John Wilkes, that great champion of press freedom. His first term in Parliament was as the Member for Aylesbury, but it was said of him by Edward Gibbon that he was a
“thorough profligate in principle as in practice … His life stained with every vice and his conversation full of blasphemy and bawdy.”
I am sure, Madam Deputy Speaker, that you would always ensure that none of us here these days conspired to follow John Wilkes’ example in that respect.
Despite the stereotype that I think does exist in parts of the country about leafy Buckinghamshire and quaint market towns, Aylesbury is a very diverse community. The town itself is one of the fastest growing urban centres anywhere in the United Kingdom, and although I will not cross swords with my right hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire Dales (Sir Patrick McLoughlin) on the subject HS2, I will say that with residential growth needs to go road and rail infrastructure and infrastructure that actually serves the local residents rather than infra- structure that bypasses them entirely.
Alongside that vibrant very diverse town—a town where in individual estates, such as Southcourt and Quarrendon, one finds in microcosm all the urban problems and challenges with which Members of the House who represent inner urban seats will be familiar—is one of the most glorious stretches of countryside of the  Chilterns and the Vale of Aylesbury. There is the extra piquancy, as the Member for Aylesbury and, at different times, either representing or being very close to Chequers, of being able to pick up—usually within about a week of whichever Prime Minister has been visiting particular shops or beauty salons or hairdressers—exactly what the Head of the Government at any particular time has been doing at the weekend.
It is a constituency, which, like our country, has changed a lot in the past quarter of a century. That was somehow summed up for me by my final constituency engagement on Saturday evening. It took place in the deepest rural part of my constituency at Radnage village hall. The hall was packed for a fundraising dinner to aid Nepal, and was presided over and inspired by Navin Gurung, the Gurkha landlord of the pub in the next village of Stokenchurch. Somehow, what summed up the evening for me was the spectacle at one moment of a Nepali traditional dancer performing her dance in front of a table containing the familiar range of bottles for the forthcoming raffle, behind which was the millennium mosaic for the village of Radnage, depicting red kites flying over the Chilterns and the beech woodlands and horse riders and hikers crossing the fields. Somehow, that image spoke to me volumes about my constituency and about our country—a country that can be at ease with itself in its modern diversity, where it is possible for people to feel that they are citizens of somewhere, and that they are rooted in a particular place and a particular heritage, but are also open to embrace and to learn from the experience and the traditions of others who also make up our country.
As well as thanking my constituents, I want also to thank the staff of the House, as others have done. I learned, particularly as Leader of the House from 2017, how much we owe to all our staff. All of us as Members know of the service that is given to us by the Library staff, the Doorkeepers and Badge Messengers, the Clerks—the Clerks from whom I learned so much in particular about drafting and parliamentary tactics during my 11 years on the Opposition Front Bench—and the catering staff, particularly the staff of the Members’ Tea Room, who somehow always manage to remain calm and cheerful despite the pressure that we on these Green Benches often put them under.
My final point is about the future of this place. We speak often about restoration and renewal, and I think we need to look beyond just the restoration and renewal of the fabric and the services—important though I believe that to be—to the restoration and renewal of the culture of the House of Commons. For what is the purpose of this place? If it is anything, it is surely to provide the forum in which the passions, fierce controversies and conflicting opinions in our country are represented, reflected and resolved in debate and votes—both in the Chamber and in Committee.
I believe that the conventions that we seek to stick to here—the rules of unparliamentary language, the fact that we refer to each other by constituency rather than name, and even the rather murky understandings that govern the relationships between Government and Opposition usual channels—are all important in trying to provide a culture within which very fierce political disagreements can be expressed in a form that is civil and democratic, and actually shows to ourselves and to those we represent that we can and should resolve such  differences democratically through debate, not out in the streets. And that involves respect between people of different parties.
I was told soon after I came here the old story of the new bright young thruster taking his place on the Benches beside an experienced elder colleague. The young man said, as the Opposition Benches filled up on the other side of the Chamber, “Ah, I see that the enemy is here in strength”, to which his senior colleague replied, “Young man, those are your political opponents; your enemies you will find on the Benches beside and behind you.”
I believe that the House of Commons at its best recognises that there can be the most serious and principled disagreement about both values and policies, but which does not see such political differences as tantamount to our opponent somehow being wicked or lacking in integrity. I think and hope that the next Parliament will make a deliberate effort to avoid the language of “traitors”, “betrayal”, “vermin” and “enemies of the people.” To overcome some of the ills that beset politics in this country at the moment will take more than an effort by Members of this House—there will be things to be done by editors and internet service providers as well. However, a start can and should be made here, and that needs to start with a recognition on all sides that restoring and renewing the reputation and standing of this place begins when Members on both sides—leaders and Members of all parties—manage to find a way again in which we can express vehemently our support for or opposition to the particular policies that we debate, while at the same time respecting the integrity and fundamental good motives of our opponents.

Steve Pound: May I begin by apologising, Madam Deputy Speaker, because there has been so much Northern Irish business over the past week that I have made my farewell speech 15 times? I am now known as the Dame Nellie Melba of west London. If anyone wishes to say any nice things about me, please let them not feel constrained by the fact that they have been said a few times already.
I leave this House with great sadness. I have to say that what tipped me over the edge was a text message from the Argyle surgery in my constituency, inviting me to attend an end of life seminar. I thought, “Maybe my time has come.” Having listened this afternoon to right hon. and hon. Members describe their glittering careers—this great cavalcade and cornucopia of achievement—I am now looking back over my years in the House with a certain sadness.
I came into the House as one of Blair’s babes in 1997. I was immediately appointed to the Broadcasting Committee, along with the right hon. Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale), and we decided to set ourselves the task of ending broadcasting of the House of Commons. I was swiftly removed from the Committee, and the right hon. Gentleman was knighted—I make no comment on that.
I was then made Parliamentary Private Secretary to my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms), who is a marvellous man. Unfortunately, I chose to vote against my Government on the part privatisation of the NHS and so had to step down. However, I was rescued from the ignominy of the outer darkness when I was made PPS to Hazel Blears, who is an amazing woman. Sadly, I had to vote against my Government on the renewal of Trident and so once again fell into silence and desuetude. However, Tony Blair, a man of sound Christian principles, knowing that God loves a sinner who repents, gave me another chance. The fact that every time I appear in the Chamber my Whip has to sit next to me reveals that, sadly, not everyone believes me. I was then appointed to be PPS to the then right hon. Member for Tooting in the Department for Transport. Sadly, High Speed 2 was going to be run through my constituency, like a great steel snake slamming through the suburbs, so I felt it necessary once again to resign.
Quite clearly I have achieved very little, but one thing that I have achieved is a knowledge and understanding of this place, and a recognition that structure is a function of purpose. It is so easy to be intoxicated by the beauty of this place. When I was first elected, Tony Blair set up something called the Modernisation of the House of Commons Committee—because, frankly, most of us needed modernising. After a few months, the members of that Committee had gone completely native and were saying, “No, this is how things have always been done.” He then had to set up a modernisation of the Modernisation of the House of Commons Committee  committee. After four weeks, our Committee reported. We then installed a tights machine in the corridor just outside Annie’s Bar—what else could we possibly have done?
I think of this building as the corporeal embodiment of the ship of state. This is a great, glorious galleon sailing across storm-tossed oceans. We have the sketch writers—Crace, Letts and people like that—up in the rigging. We have the galley, with our marvellous cooks who bring us steak and kidney pudding and duff on a regular basis. Not mentioned in all the tributes to the House staff are the Doorkeepers. They are wonderful people. The Library—amazing people. I must visit it one day. The Admission Order Office. If only they would tell me where it was, I would go there. And there are so many other incredible things. The bar has not been mentioned. In my day, there was more than one. The Strangers’ Bar! What more welcoming sight could there be than that cheerful face behind the bar, with the cheerful comment, “The usual, Mr Pound? But not all at once, I trust?” It is wonderful.
We have a firm hand on the wheel—it is marvellous to see, Madam Deputy Speaker. The captain for most of my parliamentary career was, of course, Tony Blair. He had a slightly tempestuous relationship with the first mate, or the purser, the man responsible for the purse strings. It was not so much like Aubrey and Maturin; it was more like Captain Bligh and Fletcher Christian, to be perfectly honest—not to imply that the great Anthony Charles Lynton Blair was anything like Captain Bligh.
This great ship of state will be docking in another berth before too long. I would like to think that people realise that what is important about this place is not the gorgeous neo-Gothic surrounds, the Pugin beauty or the wonder of the place; it is what happens here and the people within it. I have to say that I do not know a single person who has come into this House with ignoble motives. I do not know anyone who has come into this House not wishing to make the world a better place. In many ways, we have failed to get that message across. If anyone had been here earlier on for the debate on historical institutional abuse in Northern Ireland, they would have realised that this place is a powerhouse. It is a place where major change can take place. If we do not do it, then who does? If we do not give that political lead, then who does? If we do not set that standard and if we do not seek to protect our nation, then who will do it? As far as I am concerned, the miracle of this place is how much we do achieve. The tragedy of this place is how little we make that case.
I could not have survived all these long, lonely years out of office without the team in my office. I would particularly like to thank Sue McLeod and Diane Wall, who between them have been here for the whole of my time here. I would also like to thank my wife, who has been sitting in the Under-Gallery for four and a half hours. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] Above all, I would like to thank my fellow parliamentarians. I have made friends across the political divide. I have actually spoken at a fundraiser for the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) on the Ards peninsular.

Ian Lucas: It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Broadland (Mr Simpson); I will miss him at breakfast time.
My late father’s birthday was on 5 November. My father, Colin Lucas and my mother, Alice Lucas, were profound influences on me and they taught me some very basic values. They taught me to tell the truth, to respect the law and always to listen to other people. I do that, and that has guided me in my parliamentary career.
I want to talk about the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, of which I have been a member since 2015. Since 2017, it has shown Parliament at its best. It has worked across parties to produce work that I believe is world-leading. Twitter announced last week that it is stopping paid political advertising. I believe that that process was commenced by the DCMS Committee and its report on disinformation last year.
I am afraid that I am now going to change the tone of the debate, because I want to place on the record some information that I have concerning disinformation and the Government of the day. Sitting opposite me in this debate, I have seen many wonderful Conservative MPs for whom I have huge respect, people I have learned to respect since I came here in 2001. When I came to Parliament, I did not understand how Parliament worked so well on a cross-party basis. I know that now, and there are many, many noble, good and very skilled Conservative MPs. Unfortunately, they are not running the Government at this very serious time.
I want to draw the House’s attention to the serious position that exists on the cusp of a general election, because we have laws in place that are completely inadequate to deal with that general election. I want to quote the words of Dominic Cummings in correspondence that he sent to the Electoral Commission. He said:
“Overall it is clear that the entire regulatory structure around national elections including data is really bad. There are so many contradictions, gaps, logical lacunae that it is wide open to abuse…There has been no proper audit by anybody of how the rules could be exploited by an internal or foreign force to swing close elections. These problems were not fixed for the 2017 election, and I doubt they will be imminently. The system cannot cope with the fast-changing technology.”
The main adviser to the Prime Minister is telling us that the current legal structure for elections is unsound. We are going into a general election that is going to be fought online and we are already seeing the way in which that is affecting the campaign.

Margot James: The Information Commissioner’s Office is empowered under the Data Protection Act 2018 to produce a code of practice for political campaigning and it has produced a code. Does he agree that the next Government should put that code of practice into statute?

Ian Lucas: Absolutely I agree. I fundamentally believe that we should implement all the recommendations of the ICO and the Electoral Commission, because the legal structure under which we are fighting the election is open to electoral fraud. That is the position in which we are going into the general election.
On electoral fraud, I want to refer to some correspondence that Dominic Cummings sent to another person in the referendum campaign in 2016. He was talking about breaking spending limits in the referendum, and that led to an offence for which Vote Leave was fined. Dominic Cummings said:
“We’ve now got all the money we can spend legally. You should NOT send us your 100k. However, there is another organisation that could spend your money. Would you be willing to send the 100k to some social media ninjas who could usefully spend it on behalf of this organisation? I am very confident it would be well spent in the final crucial 5 days. Obviously it would be entirely legal.”
The truth is that it was not legal at all, and Vote Leave was fined in connection with that campaign. As a result, the matter was referred to the police and has now been referred to the Crown Prosecution Service, and the investigation is ongoing.
Furthermore, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and the Prime Minister were both aware of the fact that offences had been committed and were both heavily involved in Vote Leave. This document also has a statement from Dominic Cummings, which he wrote and sent to the Electoral Commission. He said:
“I never discussed VL’s donations to BL”—
the donations to BeLeave for which Vote Leave was fined—
“with either of them (before the referendum) and to the best of my knowledge neither did anybody else and they were wholly unaware of this issue until after the referendum.”
So, both the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster were aware of Vote Leave’s offences, but they have not come clean to the House of Commons or to the DCMS Committee by producing that evidence. Furthermore, Dominic Cummings has refused to come to the DCMS Committee to speak about these matters. Even worse, the Prime Minister will not tell him to come to this House to speak to the Select Committee to explain himself and to give evidence. I have secured these documents through the Committee, and I am placing them on the public record, because they relate  to something that should be known by the public before we vote in a general election. That information has been withheld from the British public, and it ought to be known.
What the British public also need to know is that, apart from the honourable Conservative Members facing me at the moment, we have a Government whose leadership includes a Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, who is in charge of electoral reform and who is not divulging his full knowledge of the 2016 referendum, his role in it, and the offences committed at the time. If this House is to regain the respect of the public, Select Committees need real powers to compel witnesses to attend. We should never again be frustrated by a Prime Minister who prevents a witness from giving evidence to a Committee.
It has been a real honour to be in this place. I have loved every minute. I love this House of Commons, and I will be sad to leave. We need to respect each other more in this House but—to go back to my mother and my father—we must have basic honesty. There is nothing complicated about that. Telling the truth and straight- forwardness are the principles that we should stick to, but I am afraid the Government do not have them at the moment.

Roberta Blackman-Woods: It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton), with whom I worked well when she was a Minister. She has a strong interest in Durham. Although he is not in his place, I wish to pay tribute to the right hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt), who was a brilliant and dedicated Minister, and this House will really feel his loss. I wish at the beginning to put on record my congratulations to the new Speaker and to pay tribute to former Speaker Bercow for all he has done in recent years to uphold the principle of parliamentary sovereignty.
Without doubt the greatest privilege of my life has been to serve as the MP for the beautiful City of Durham, and I want to thank all the House of Commons  staff, including the Library staff, for the huge help they have given me over the years—they are definitely the unsung heroes of our democracy. My life here has also been hugely helped by my friends, those in the Chamber today, colleagues in the north-east and, in particular, my hon. Friends the Members for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson), for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson), for West Ham (Lyn Brown), for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley) and for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne). I have made long-lasting friendships that will endure beyond Parliament.
Of course, I also want to thank my fantastic staff over the years. I thank those in Westminster—Richard, Emma, Georgie, Rafi and Robyn. I also thank those in Durham—Paul, Nick and especially Christine, who has been with me since the beginning. I simply could not have done the job without them. In an age of increased automation, they are the kind, helpful voice on the end of the telephone, and they have done so much to sort out the problems for my constituents over the years.
I also want to thank my family—Tim, Maeve, Tom and Albie, and my many brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, and extended family—for their help and encouragement over the past 14 years. I intend to have more time to see them now, and I just hope they think that that is a good idea.
In Parliament, I have worked closely with the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, the Inter-Parliamentary Union and the all-party group on the United Nations to improve our development policies and ensure that the world, not just this country, is better governed. Again, I think that the work of the staff in the CPA and IPU often goes unrecognised, and we should thank them. In here, I have relentlessly raised a number of issues that emerge from my Durham constituency: the need for more money for education; the need for universal free school meals—I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Sunderland West for all the work she has done and will continue to do on that; the need for better licencing and planning policies; the need for prison reform and to look at how the penal system affects women; and the need for a greater recognition of the value that universities bring to our society and economy. I hope to continue that work beyond Parliament.

Peter Heaton-Jones: I might have guessed, Madam Deputy Speaker. I will, of course, abide by your strictures.
It is an absolute pleasure to follow the hon. Member for City of Durham (Dr Blackman-Woods), who made a typically thoughtful speech. It is great to follow a Member with a double-barrelled name; I fear there will be too few of us after the forthcoming election.
It is also a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton), because we are part of the south-west mafia. There is a group of MPs from Somerset, Devon and Cornwall who have worked closely together to push forward on what we need for our region, and my hon. Friend has been front and centre in that proper and very successful campaign, but it is a work in progress, and I just want to take a few minutes on this, my last day in Parliament, to talk about some of the things that we have been able to achieve, as well as some of the unfinished business that still needs to be addressed.
We have had success since 2015 in putting North Devon on the Government’s radar and on the political map in a way that it simply has not been for too long. We have achieved an investment of nearly £100 million for a vital new road link in North Devon. People have  heard me bang on about the North Devon link road enough in this place, and it would be silly for me not to do so on my last appearance. It is a vital bit of infrastructure investment, and I am so pleased that we have secured it.
We have also secured the future of the Royal Marines base at Chivenor in the constituency. There was a huge community campaign after the Ministry of Defence said that it was earmarked for closure. The community got together and said, “Up with this we will not put.” I am delighted to say that not only is Chivenor now safeguarded for the future, but that even as late as today I have been talking to the Ministry of Defence to make sure that we can do more there with the unique environment and the service personnel.
North Devon has a commitment to a brand-new district hospital, which is so welcome. Even though I will no longer be the MP, I am going to ensure that we stick to that commitment and that the Government continue to deliver on their promises for the NHS.
All those are things we have achieved, but I mentioned some unfinished business, and I wish to cover three subjects briefly. First, just like, I am sure, Members from all parties, I continue to be concerned by the state of mental healthcare for our young people in particular. It is an absolute shock to realise that the most common cause of death among young men aged between 18 and 35 is not an accident or an incident, or a drugs overdose or a physical illness; it is that they take their own lives. That is a mental health condition that we must tackle, and all Governments of all colours must do so urgently. I have done a lot of work on social care and the regulation and inspection of care home, and that needs to continue.
I really do not want to go down this road too controversially, but I worked for the BBC for many happy years. The BBC and the Government of whatever colour must ensure that the over-75s continue to get the free licence fee concession. I have spoken about that at great length, and I do not intend to rehearse all those arguments now.
As we are on the subject of the media, may I just say a few words about social media, which was touched on by other colleagues? The pressure that MPs find themselves under because of social media is something that has not been sufficiently addressed. I am fortunate in that I have not suffered the sort of threats, abuse or intimidation that many other colleagues in this House have, but none the less—I think that you only get this if you have been an MP—the constant low-level incoming does start to chip away. I do not think that this House, the social media companies or our legislation has caught up with what can be done about that. This happens, as has been said earlier, during election periods. We need to ensure that the role of social media during this and all future elections is more tightly controlled under law and under regulation.
I want quite properly to thank people without whom it would not have been possible for me to do this job. First, the North Devon Conservative Association has been a huge support to me ever since I was selected to do this role at the beginning of 2013. May I just mention the three chairs of the North Devon Conservative Association: Jeremy Smith-Bingham, David Barker and the current chair, Chris Guyver, who I have put in a pickle having to reselect a North Devon candidate in the space of a few days. [Interruption.] Does my hon. Friend  the Member for Reigate (Crispin Blunt) know him by any chance. It sounds like he might. I want to thank all the Ministers and officials and the special advisers who I worked with when I was Parliamentary Private Secretary at two Departments—the Department for Work and Pensions and the Ministry of Justice. It was a pleasure to serve them and to serve the Government in that role.
I thank my colleagues, the south-west MPs, including my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton), who I am glad to see in her place. All of us, across the region, have worked really hard since 2015—there have been a lot of us since 2015 and long may that continue—to promote the south-west and its interests. I also thank my absolutely brilliant staff in the constituency and here at Westminster. Let me just mention by name my four current members of staff. Thank you very much indeed to Matt Cox and to my three members of staff who have been with me since the beginning in 2015: Marianne Kemp, Dan Shapland and David Hoare, who have all been brilliant in helping me along.
Finally, I thank the people of North Devon, who did me the privilege and honour of electing me not once, but twice to be their Member of Parliament in North Devon. Helping them, assisting them, meeting them, and sometimes having animated conversations with them really has been an honour and a privilege, and I wish my successor in the role all the very best. I clearly hope that they will be sitting on the Conservative Benches, but whoever they are, I truly wish them all the best. I thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and the staff of the House as well. It is now time to get Pexit done!

Stephen Twigg: It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for North Devon (Peter Heaton-Jones). I will start, if I may, by thanking everyone with whom I have had the honour to work in this place. In particular, I wish to put on record my thanks to my amazing staff both in the constituency and here in Parliament.
I had the privilege to serve for eight years the constituency in which I grew up and where most of my close family still live—Enfield, Southgate. That result in Enfield, Southgate in 1997 was once voted the third greatest television moment ever. This was in a survey in 1998, so it was fresh in people’s minds. In that poll, the greatest television moment ever was the first man on the moon, the second was the release of Nelson Mandela from prison and the third was my defeat of Michael Portillo in that election. I have told this story once or twice over the past two decades, and I should point out that it was a poll of The Observer readers and Channel 4 viewers, so was not necessarily a cross-section of the public as a whole.
When I lost in 2005, I sought refuge in Liverpool, and I am immensely grateful to my local Labour party and to the people of the great constituency of West Derby in the city of Liverpool for electing me three times since 2010. Liverpool is a city with a truly amazing spirit, and that spirit is embodied by the campaign for justice for those who lost their lives at Hillsborough 30 years ago. I pay tribute to the families and campaigners who did so much to ensure that that injustice was properly addressed. It is a city with a very vibrant community and voluntary sector. One of the things I have done is to volunteer at a local food bank at St John’s church in Tuebrook in my constituency. I think there is something profoundly wrong that people in this day and age are relying on food banks, but I pay tribute to those who work in them.
Education has long been my No. 1 passion, and I served for three years as Minister for Schools. In that role, I set up and led the London challenge programme to improve schools here in the capital city. In Liverpool, I have run the Liverpool to Oxbridge Collaborative to encourage more state school students to consider Oxford or Cambridge. I also chair the all-party parliamentary group on global education.
Since 2015, it has been an honour to chair the Select Committee on International Development. I thank its staff and all its Members, past and present—in particular, my friend the hon. Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy). It is so important that the UK remains engaged globally, and one of the ways in which we do that is through our commitment to development and humanitarian relief. We can be proud of our 0.7% commitment and that we have an independent Department—the Department for International Development—that leads in the delivery of those programmes. We face huge challenges of climate change, conflict, poverty and inequality, and we have the tool of the sustainable development goals to address these crises, but we also need to maintain our focus on some appalling humanitarian situations in places such as Yemen and Syria, as well as the Rohingya crisis covering the people of Burma and Bangladesh. I hope that whoever takes over from me as Chair of the Committee will pick up those challenges.
In 1997, my right hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw) and I were the first ever Members of Parliament who were openly LGBT at the time of our first election. I pay tribute to our friend Lord Smith of Finsbury, who for a long period was the only openly gay Member of Parliament. I am very proud that there are now 45 Members in this House who are openly LGBT and that we have seen huge legal progress in this country, although we still have a long way to go to achieve full equality across the world. Thanks to civil partnerships, I was able to marry Mark 13 years ago. We always called our civil partnership a marriage, but I was then very proud to vote with others across the House for equal marriage. I really thank Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron, all of whom showed great commitment to the cause of equality for people who are LGBT. As we move forward, I hope that we will address some of the very big challenges that LGBT people face around the world and ensure that part of our soft power and our approach to global human rights is about addressing those injustices, wherever they rear their heads.
I conclude by echoing comments made by a number of Members, particularly my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones), who talked about the importance of appealing to the best instincts of the British people, and the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb), who spoke very powerfully about how we need to bring people together. We have seen a growth of a particular strand of authoritarian populism across our continent and in the United States, Brazil and other parts of the world. It poses a huge challenge for our politics. Here in the UK, Brexit is in a sense both a consequence and a cause of some very fundamental divisions and inequalities that scar our society.
Against that backdrop, I hope that the new Parliament will be able to do its best to bring people back together. I have never like the adversarialism in this place. I did not like it when I was a Government Member with a majority of almost 200; I certainly do not like it in opposition. I think we do really have a lot in common with each other. We need to be more open about the need to address the evidence that is available on the policy challenges that we face. One of the reasons I have enjoyed chairing a Select Committee is that it is cross-party working and it is based on the best available evidence, not the best available slogan for carrying the headlines that day. I hope that is something that we can all reflect on in the weeks, months and years ahead.
I want to finish by quoting the late Jo Cox. I stand here in front of the shield in Jo’s memory. I only got to know Jo in that very brief period from her election in 2015 to her murder a year later. Jo said that
“we are far more united and have far more in common than that which divides us.”—[Official Report, 3 June 2015; Vol. 596, c. 675.]
That message is one that I hope we can all take forward in this election campaign but also into the next Parliament.

John Hayes: I cannot let that pass without paying tribute to my hon. Friend’s outstanding work in that field, which typifies his whole approach. His care, his insight and his dedication to purpose is exemplary. The whole House will miss him. Might I just cheekily ask him to work with me, when he has more time, on the campaign on haemochromatosis, which affects nearly 380,000 people? He can work from outside Parliament; I can work within it.

Teresa Pearce: I would like to thank my fantastic family, my friends and my staff, who are amazing, as well as all the people I have worked with here and in the constituency, but most of all I would like to thank my husband, who nine years ago put his life, dreams and ambitions on hold so that I could follow mine.
When you come into this place, it is the strangest thing. The first thing I did was to look for a job description, and as hon. Members all know, there is none. You become a combination of a councillor, a barrack-room lawyer, a trade union official and a social worker, yet an MP’s power, particularly in opposition, is more perceived than real. People ask you to get involved in everything and anything. When I was elected, I got 22,000 emails in the first year. The level of expectation from people is that you can solve everything from mice in their flat to conflict in the middle east, and of course the bins—there is always the bins. There are myriad ways that people can watch you now, and I am told by my constituents that I need to be at all these events in the constituency, but then the same people say to me, “I was watching the Chamber, and you weren’t in there. Where were you?” And at the same time, they want to know why you have not answered the 22,000 emails, which is why many people receive replies from me at 1 o’clock in the morning.
There was much I wanted to say this afternoon about the things I had done and the things I wished I had done, but we have sat here and passed the Historical Institutional Abuse (Northern Ireland) Bill. I listened to that testimony and it was familiar to me, so I have changed what I planned to say because I needed to say this. I could talk about what I have achieved, but what has been achieved by me here has actually been achieved because of my parents. Both of my parents were brought up in care—my mother in the infamous Nazareth House, which we heard about earlier, and my father by the Christian Brothers—and I can give personal testimony about the damage done to them for the whole of their lives. The shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound), who is no longer in his place, asked from the Dispatch Box: what must those children have thought of adults, and how could  they ever trust? Well, I can tell the House that they never did. It became increasingly difficult as they got older, when we needed to get carers or meals on wheels to go in, because everybody who came in who they thought was from the authorities they sacked immediately the same day. They feared to the very end of their lives losing their liberty, because they had lost it as children when they had been incarcerated.
It is testimony to my parents that they never visited on me and my sister Rose the horrors of their childhood, and it is testimony to them that I am an MP now. My mother lived to see me elected, and she was as proud as punch. Sadly, my dad died in 2009, so he did not get the same bragging rights. My dad, Arthur Farrington, was what people would call a bit of a character. He had a tendency to embellish the truth, and sometimes he just made things up. He used to say to me and my sister that he was born in the workhouse, but then he used to say a lot of things so we did not take a lot of notice. When I was elected and was doing research on children’s homes in the 1930s, it came as a huge surprise to find that his parents were actually resident in Ormskirk workhouse at the time he was born. It seems I owe my dad a bit of an apology, as he was actually telling the truth. However, I still do not believe that the ring that my auntie had, which clearly came from Woolworths, was given to her by the Pope.
It is a privilege to hold the office of MP. I left school at 17, got married soon after and became a mother, but at 18 I found myself deserted by my husband and facing the world alone with a small baby and bleak prospects while the rest of my friends went to university. However, thanks to a small council flat in Belvedere, a GLC-funded day nursery and a Bexley Council-funded careers adviser, I was set on the road to independence, self-respect and a career. I have been successful and my family has thrived because society invested in me, and that investment has been paid back over and over. Sadly, however, those services no longer exist for many who find themselves in the same circumstances and do not have that ladder. In fact, the safety net of the welfare state that once saved me no longer exists in that real sense. It is more like a trapdoor you fall through and you may never get back up. That is why I have spent the last nine years trying to speak up for Erith and Thamesmead, so my neighbours get the opportunities that I had and can turn around their lives when they fall on hard times.
I would like to thank my constituents for the support they have shown me for the last nine years, electing me three times. It is now time to pass the baton on to someone else, and I am sure that they will show her the same support.

Nick Herbert: Thank you for calling me to speak, Madam Deputy Speaker, and commiserations on yesterday—I congratulate the new Speaker. I apologise for being unable to be here at the start of the debate. I had not intended to speak, but I decided only last night to stand down as the Member of Parliament for Arundel and South Downs, the constituency that I have been honoured to represent for nearly 15 years.
It was a pleasure to listen to the speech of my right hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire Dales (Sir Patrick McLoughlin). Some 33 years ago, while working as a  young researcher, I helped a young candidate who was standing in a by-election in West Derbyshire. I claim that the 100 votes that my right hon. Friend secured to win the seat were won by me, and he claims that he would have won handsomely had it not been for my disastrous research.
I went on to stand for Berwick-upon-Tweed in north Northumberland. Unfortunately, that was in 1997, the year of Armageddon. My efforts in that beautiful rural constituency were not helped early on when I opened a coffee morning with a speech urging everyone to vote Conservative, only to be told that I was in fact at a meeting of the Methodists. I could not have been expected to know that that particular village had two village halls, but I learnt an important lesson about knowing your constituency.
I was immensely privileged to be chosen at the very last moment to stand for Arundel and South Downs for the Conservatives, and I believe that someone else will be very lucky indeed to be chosen at the very last minute to stand for what I believe is the best constituency in the country, full of the most wonderful people and strong communities. I will miss it a very great deal. I fought four general elections and my majority has gone up every time to a record level, and I know that it is smart to quit while ahead.
I made my maiden speech in a debate on rural issues. I spoke last in that debate, too, and nobody told me that I was permitted to go to what the Americans call the restroom while waiting to make my speech. I waited for what seemed to be hours, absolutely desperate for it, and then made the shortest maiden speech in history as a consequence.
I then went to see the Whips to explain that it was very important for the new Member of Parliament for Arundel and South Downs to watch Australia play the Duke of Norfolk’s XI at the Arundel castle cricket ground. The Whips told me that not only was that entirely possible, but I should submit any request, at any time, for any sporting event that I felt I needed to attend. I had no idea that they were being sarcastic and so proceeded to give them a long list of all the sporting events I wished to attend that year. I have never lived it down.
I soon found myself on the Front Bench and, for a very brief time—this is a salutary lesson for all the young people who will enter the House after the election—was billed as a rising star. I then plummeted into the depths of the Home Office, a fall from which I never entirely recovered.
I agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Sir David Lidington) that attending this debate, in which we have heard some marvellous speeches, is rather like attending the reading of one’s own obituary. I am not entirely certain that everyone would be effusive enough, so I intend to list some of the things that I have been involved in—my serious point is that I intend to continue working in a number of important areas that I have worked on in this place. They include LGBT rights, which my friend the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) mentioned, the campaign for equal marriage, setting up the all-party parliamentary group on global lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights, and setting up the Global Equality Caucus, run so ably by Alan Wardle and supported by Andrew Slinn.
I also set up the all-party parliamentary group on global tuberculosis, to help fight the world’s deadliest disease. The Global TB Caucus has succeeded in driving TB up the agenda, with a high-level meeting at the United Nations. It is ably led by Sarah Kirk, with support on the APPG from Janika Hauser, and it was set up with brilliant initial work by my friend Matt Oliver.
I have recently assumed the chairmanship of the Countryside Alliance, which I intend to devote a lot of time to, returning to my roots, because I believe passionately in supporting rural communities, in the freedom to choose and in ensuring that we protect the rural way of life. I will be running the think-tank that I have set up, the Project for Modern Democracy, just as I previously set up the think-tank Reform, because I believe we need new thinking on Whitehall reform, planning and how we ensure markets operate fairly in the modern world.
I just want to say something briefly about Brexit. I set up the national no campaign against joining the euro. For a long time I was thought of as a Eurosceptic, but I led the Conservatives In campaign to remain in the European Union. Nevertheless, I accepted the result of the referendum immediately. I want to dispute the idea that the only principled position for remainers to take is somehow to gainsay the referendum result. I do not believe that that is true. Actually, I think it is a principled and honourable position to accept the result of the referendum, because in the end it is about democracy. I have done that, which is why I support the Prime Minister in successfully seeking a deal. I do not think that we should demonise the millions of people who voted for remain, but have accepted the result and think a deal is possible. Rather, we should investigate more closely why people voted for leave and what exactly they wanted, and have a more mature, sober and sensible debate on those issues.
Finally, I would like to thank my brilliant staff: Michelle Taylor, my wonderful constituency assistant; Alex Black, who runs my office; Lynsey White, my wonderful secretary; and Chris Cook, my researcher. I would like to thank members of my Conservative association and my chairmen, Angela Litchfield, Sue Holland, Malcolm Gill and Peter Griffiths. I thank my constituents for doing me the great honour of returning me to Arundel and South Downs. Above all, I thank my partner, my closest and best friend, Jason Eades, without whose tireless and unquestioning support I would never have been able to do this job in the first place. Thank you all for doing me this great honour. I am very sad to be going, but I know it is the right time to do so.

John Woodcock: What a privilege it is to follow that heartfelt speech. It is also a coincidence, because, as the majority of the right hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) has gone up at every successive election, mine has gone down. [Laughter.]
In 2010, when I first came into the House, we achieved the lowest swing away from Labour in the entire country. In the most recent general election, in 2017, I hung on by a mere 209 votes. As most people who looked at that will know, it is a total miracle that I am here at all. I never expected to be able to make a valedictory speech  and I have viewed every single day of this Parliament as an extra, unexpected bonus. It was hard enough to hold the constituency of Barrow and Furness, the home of the Trident nuclear submarine programme, with the former Leader of the Opposition, the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband). People, probably understandably, did not trust him entirely on the issue of Trident. However, it was an impossibility to hold the constituency with the current Leader of the Opposition. It was only by completely disavowing him that I was able, against all expectations including mine, to hang on.
I have, of course, paid in one way or another since then, but I will never forget the moment at 1 o’clock in the morning of election night when I thought, “My goodness, we might actually hold on here.” I had to get on the phone to my ex, Mandy, who ran my campaign to get me into Parliament in the first place, and say, “Look, you know I’ve offered to take the kids all summer, well…” I am deeply indebted to her for her forbearance on that and on so many issues, as we have made a crazy modern family life work. More on that towards the end of my speech.
I want to say how sad I am to be leaving, but I think we can be really proud of some the things we have achieved over these past nine and a half years. The brand new maternity unit literally would not have happened without the campaign led by local mums, including Mandy. Of course, I supported the campaign wholeheartedly —I knew what was good for me—but it showed that when the people of Barrow and Furness stand up, they are able to make themselves listened to. Together, we have effected real change.
The Leader of the House knows that it is more unusual to win a vote at the moment than it is to lose one, and 18 July 2016 will always be etched on my memory as the day that this House voted by 472 votes to 117 to renew Trident and fire the starting gun properly on the Dreadnought submarine programme, which, even now, is providing 9,000 directly employed jobs and sustaining the whole Furness economy. I am just sad to be leaving at a time when we are making critical decisions on how we ensure that that investment can lift the whole area out of the still really appalling pockets of deprivation and the lack of hope that remains in the Furness area. If I can play any role outside this place—possibly in a David Brent way, if I keep turning up to former offices—I want to play whatever role I can to ensure that that can happen in future.
I came into this House having been privileged to serve as a special adviser for a period in No. 10, and I never thought that the life of a constituency MP—trying to help the community change and lead that change—would be what drove me. That is what I will miss most of all from the job. It is well known in this place, but completely unknown outside it, how relatively little of that we drive ourselves as MPs, so—like many others—I need to give my heartfelt thanks to my team. Frank, Natalie, Angela, Carmen and the new arrival, Sian, have done extraordinary things. Literally thousands of people have had their lives changed for the better in ways that, more often than not, I have not known about personally, but they have delivered. I am so pleased that Cassie, my office manager, has come all the way here—it is a hell of a long way to get down from Barrow; it takes four hours on the train on a good day— and is in the Gallery today. Like a number of my staff—but none more so than  Cassie—she has stuck with me through some really difficult times and has stayed loyal, and I will always be grateful for that.
As a constituency MP, I am proud of what we have done, but I wish that I could be proud of what we have achieved in our politics over the last 10 years. We are not standing here as a Parliament of success. I am sorry that my attempt to wrestle my politics—the politics of the progressive centre-left—out of the hands of the extremists that have gripped my former party has not been a success. I am really grateful to my friends—who will remain my friends—in the Labour party, even though we have taken a very different view on how best to tackle that extremism.
I am really excited about the challenge that I am going on to as the Government’s special envoy on countering violent extremism; I want to continue to play a role in public life. Although I am sad to be leaving, I am leaving for absolutely the best reason: it was not part of the script that Issy and I would be having a baby, but it is a wonderful, wonderful thing on which to leave. Their two sisters, Maisie and Molly, are going to be wonderful big sisters, and I just cannot wait for the future that we have got together.

Valerie Vaz: Thank you, Mr Speaker. I congratulate you on your victory, and I know that you will make a very good Speaker.
When I first sat here today, 60 Members were saying that they would be leaving the House. The number has now risen to 62, following the announcements by the right hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) and the ex-Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr Hammond), that they would be standing down.
The speeches were a bit like maiden speeches to start with—everyone has such a beautiful constituency—but what was clear was the amazing array of talent that we are losing. The right hon. Member for Derbyshire Dales (Sir Patrick McLoughlin) has served his party so well. He has been an excellent Chief Whip—I do not suppose that many people say that, but I will—and has given 33 years of devotion to the House. I also thank Mrs McLoughlin. My right hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley (Sir Kevin Barron) has had extensive experience of posts ranging from parliamentary private secretary to Chair of a Select Committee.
The right hon. Member for Wantage (Mr Vaizey)—I know that he added “Didcot”, but the annunciator said “Wantage”—is not standing down; he was contributing to the pre-dissolution debate. He talked about the arts, and I want to thank him, because when he was in opposition he visited the New Art Gallery in Walsall, where anyone who goes into the lift will hear the voice of Noddy Holder.
My hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey) was true to herself. She is also a formidable coach of Arsenal Ladies Football Club. I agree with her about Balj Rai—he is absolutely fantastic—and I want to pay tribute to Max Freedman, in her office, who made a great contribution to the independent complaints and grievance process.
The right hon. Member for Sevenoaks (Sir Michael Fallon) leaves a huge legacy. He was what people refer to as the “dead cat on the table”—he was always the one who diverted people and moved them to another point in the debate—but his nickname was “the Minister for the ‘Today’ programme”. He is right about debates on foreign affairs: we need more of those. I hope the Leader of the House does not mind my raising again the case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, and expressing the hope that she will soon be released from prison.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd) is an extensive human rights champion, and a champion for miners’ compensation—the subject of miners was a thread running through the debate—and, of course, she was a human rights envoy. She has produced an incredible body of public service, both as a Member of the European Parliament and as an MP. Wales is also losing my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd (Owen Smith) and my hon. Friend the Member for Ynys Môn (Albert Owen), whom I have worked with. I hope he will continue his work with Welsh tourism.
What can we say about my hon. Friend the Member for Wrexham (Ian C. Lucas)? An outstanding solicitor and an outstanding Minister who has a great way of asking important questions. He has made an important contribution to the debate today about how we run our elections. He will be missed, but we can see him in the documentary “The Great Hack.”
When I first came to this House in 2010, the right hon. Member for Putney (Justine Greening) said that Michael Howard had visited her constituency, and had resigned as leader. Maybe he knew—this is what came across to me when I first saw her at the Dispatch Box—that she could be a future leader of her party. I am sorry that she is standing down because I think she would have been an excellent leader and an excellent Prime Minister. She did some fantastic work at the Department for International Development. The logo  for UK Aid was down to her, as was the audit of all the money that was given out to everyone; I cited that to some students I spoke to in the House. I thank her for her excellent work on that.
I will put together my hon. Friends the Members for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey), for Warrington North (Helen Jones) and for Liverpool, Riverside (Dame Louise Ellman) as they make me think of Donald Dewar. He said that he could never get selected and then when he finally did, and was elected to the House, he was confronted by people who beat him. Those three Members all beat me; I was runner-up to all three of them.
My hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North has made a huge contribution to the Petitions Committee; it is now a very important part of the work we do here and she rightly paid tribute to the Clerks of the Committee.
What can I say about the right hon. Member for Aylesbury (Sir David Lidington)? He was an absolutely fantastic Leader of the House. I do not have time to do justice to the work that he has done here. He started out as a special adviser to Douglas Hurd and I keep saying, “Where are those members of the Conservative party like Douglas Hurd, like the right hon. Gentleman and indeed like Douglas Hurd’s son, the right hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (Mr Hurd)?” They are all going, and all are incredible public servants. The right hon. Member for Aylesbury was very kind to me when I first became shadow Leader of the House and we had very important conversations that we knew were not going anywhere. He made an important point for us to take forward for the future—we must ensure that this House moves forward. I hope he will continue to play an active role in public life because he is needed.
The right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) was a Health Minister when I visited him and asked him to take up the cause of John’s campaign with Nicci Gerrard, Julia Jones and Francis Wheen, which was to allow family members to visit people in hospital who have dementia. Nicci Gerrard found that her father did not have an opportunity for interaction with his family—perhaps just playing a game of chess—and that that had a detrimental effect. When the right hon. Gentleman was a Minister he facilitated that opportunity for visiting.
The right hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt) was an outstanding Minister and an outstanding parliamentarian, and is an outstanding human being. Oh, I am not the right person to be doing this given my past record of breaking down. I do not know what we will do without him. He has been absolutely fantastic. We walked arm in arm to St Margaret’s church when we paid tribute to Jo Cox. It was a very special day, and I will never forget his kindness. He talks about kindness; he is a really decent person. As he has said to me, his constituency is lucky as it has two MPs, because of course he is ably supported by Eve who did a fantastic job for Christians in Parliament.
I will turn now to my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound). There are four of us here who used to be on the council in Ealing together: my hon. Friend, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr Sharma) and me. My hon. Friend the Member for Ealing North always used to show us up when he was a councillor. People used to say, “You’ve got to be like Steve Pound, because he turns  up and fixes our boiler.” He actually went into people’s lofts and did the work—we would write the letters and he would do the work.
The hon. Member for Bosworth (David Tredinnick) and I served on the Health Committee. It showed how cross-party work can be done in this House, and I hope he will continue with his work on health.
There was an important point of order that you missed, Mr Speaker, and I therefore want to mention the hon. Member for South Ribble (Seema Kennedy). She was the first woman Parliamentary Private Secretary to a Prime Minister, a role she performed really well at a very difficult time. She has been an excellent colleague and an excellent Minister, and she will be missed.
I will turn now to the right hon. Member for Broadland (Mr Simpson). I should not have been in the Lobby with him, but he was in the Lobby with me and I know how deeply he struggled with voting the way he did. He voted for his country rather than his party; he put his personal loyalties aside and made sure that he did that for his country. He will be a fantastic loss. The sad thing about this is that we now see how wonderful everyone is, in the way they speak and the stories they tell. He is truly an honourable gentleman.
I have watched the hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton) nurse other hon. Members in this House when she was a vice-chair of the Tory party; she has been an assiduous vice-chair. She has been very kind to her colleagues and I know that she has been an excellent Minister. All the replies I have received from her have been absolutely fantastic, and she will be missed. Her manner is a gentle one, but she has a lot of strength. I know that her point about the Official Report and what we can do in that regard will be taken forward, and I am happy to work with the Leader of the House on that.
My hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham (Dr Blackman-Woods) has done some great work in the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, and I hope she continues to do that, along with her work with universities and higher education. She, too, will be missed.
The hon. Member for North Devon (Peter Heaton-Jones) is right about mental healthcare, and I hope that he continues to work on this important policy. He is also right about free TV licences for the over-75s; I am glad that he said that.
Turning to my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg): yes, we were all up for Portillo. He and I met a long time ago when we were going down to the Labour party conference. At that time, there was a section 28, which has now completely disappeared, so we know that politics can change and that we can make a difference.
The hon. Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) has been a wonderful colleague. We have worked well together on hospital issues and he will certainly be remembered for his work for the Francis report. He has also been a champion for getting funds for the NHS. I also want to thank him for introducing me to Bananagrams, which is like Scrabble without the arguments.
The struggle that my hon. Friend the Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Teresa Pearce) had to become a Labour candidate has turned her into an absolutely exemplary Member of Parliament, and her life story has shown why she will be missed; her strength and her  story are absolutely fantastic. Andrew, who works for me, is a constituent of hers, and he says that she is a fantastic MP. Sadly, she has chosen to be an MP no longer; she wants to be with her family.
The right hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs made a speech that was something of an emergency intervention. We are sorry to see him go, as he has been absolutely fantastic and a really assiduous Minister. I asked a colleague why the right hon. Gentleman was in the Chamber for this debate, and now we know. He had seven minutes to set out his case, which might be slightly more than he had for his maiden speech. It is true that he does have a very nice constituency.
It is good to see my hon. Friend the Member for Barrow and Furness (John Woodcock) back here. He has been through some really difficult times, but he has always worked with, for and on behalf of his constituents, wherever he has been. I wish him well with his new family and his new post.
My hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Paul Farrelly) has done some sterling work on the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee. Finally, I just want to say to the hon. Member for Southend West (Sir David Amess), because this is a pre-recess Adjournment debate, that I must make a bid for Southend to get city status.
As this is the final day, I want to thank everyone. I want the Clerk of the House to pass down to everyone in his directorate our thanks for all the work they have done. I thank all the Clerks who, during difficult times, have given us excellent advice. I also want to thank all those in the Official Report, the Library and the Tea Room, the cleaning and catering staff, the Speaker’s Office and the post room. I post something here at seven o’clock and it arrives in Walsall the next day. I thank all our staff, including my Chief Whip, the Whips and Luke and Simon. We have the most amazing, talented people in this House who will no longer be here, and I hope that they will think about serving their country. I want to thank them for all the work they have done, and I want to wish every hon. Member all the best for their campaigns.

Jacob Rees-Mogg: It is very humbling to close this debate. I have worked out that there is over 540 years of experience in the Members who are standing down and if you place that end to end, I think that gets us back to the middle of the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth. It is an extraordinary degree of experience and political contribution. Mr Speaker, this is my first opportunity to congratulate you as you take the Chair. I think of all the work, and all the restoration and renewal, that you are going to do, both to the buildings and to our culture, which I think we are all looking forward to.
Like the right hon. Lady, at the end of a Session, I thank, on behalf of all Members, the staff of the House, the members’ staff, security staff, the Doorkeepers, the civil servants and all those who keep the show on the road and are always here when we need them. Gratitude to the staff came through in all the speeches that were made, including that of my the right hon Friend the Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (Mr Hurd), who has hereditary staff taken on from his  father. I think that that is unusual, but it nonetheless shows the commitment of staff to this House, and I pay compliment to him while I am mentioning his staff.
Now it is my privilege to go through the Members who have spoken. I have nine minutes to do it, so forgive me for being brief. I am saving up one or two for the end. The right hon. Member for Rother Valley (Sir Kevin Barron) has been such a fantastic servant of this House. Running the Standards and Privileges Committee was a very hard job to do and his non-Oscar speech was better than most Oscar speeches.
I am not sure whether my right hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (Mr Vaizey) is retiring––maybe, maybe not––but his protection of the arts and his service are noble. His point about technology and the economy is fundamental.
Dare I say that the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey) is every Tory’s favourite socialist, though I think the word socialist may be unfair in her case? I find that I agree with her on almost everything, so either I have moved to the left at some point mysteriously or she has moved some way to the right. She will be enormously missed. I loved her comment that there is always tradition for a reason, which is practically my motto, so I very much agreed with that.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Sir Michael Fallon) served four Prime Ministers and very kindly invited me to speak at Chartwell. One of the greatest honours that I have ever had was to speak in the home of perhaps our greatest ever Prime Minister. My right hon. Friend shows great kindness to new Members, which is perhaps little known, but it also makes one think about fate. I supported him to be Chairman of the Treasury Committee, which, by great good fortune, he did not get but went on to a glittering Cabinet career instead, which was probably better all round. My noble Friend Lord Tyrie got the Treasury Committee, which he served with great distinction.
We heard the tributes to the right hon. Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd)––I probably massacred my pronunciation––with the tributes to our previous Speaker. I do not know the right hon. Lady enormously well, but it became so clear during those tributes that she is loved across the House and must be one of the most popular Members for her work in favour of peace and human rights and to stop child abuse. I salute her on behalf of the whole House for what she has done.
I have a compliment for my right hon. Friend the Member for Putney (Justine Greening) from one of my civil servants which, if I may, I will read out:
“She has always taken the House very seriously and as a Minister, she impressed upon her Department the need to think constantly about Parliament, to make a case to Parliament and to convince Members across the House that the Department was doing the right thing.”
I think that that is a noble tribute and it has not come from me; it is not a political tribute but is from the civil servants with whom she worked. I so agree with her in her efforts to make social mobility a reality. That is something we should all want to do, and I am glad she is going to continue to work on that.
The hon. Member for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey) first contested a seat at the age of 24, which is a very young age at which to contest a seat. He has been a distinguished Member of this House and is still very  passionate about what he believes in, about what he wants to do and about his commitment to Select Committees, which is of importance to the whole House.
The right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) showed in his final few words his amazing campaigning zeal. Though we all tease the Liberal Democrats, what we love about the true Liberals is that they believe in campaigning and they have strong principles for which they campaign. He has been such a champion for his constituency; he has been a champion for what it believes in and what it voted for.
My right hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt) is, I think, just one of the most gentlemanly, gentle and kindly Members of this House. He was enormously helpful to new MPs, and he probably has the best manners of anybody in this House.
My hon. Friend the Member for Bosworth (David Tredinnick) has been such a campaigner for what he chooses to believe in, and the advice he gave us at the end was brilliant. Seneca is normally only quoted by my right hon Friend the Prime Minister, so it was an ambitious quotation. “Choose enemies carefully,” has a touch of steel about it, “Stay out of the bars,” has a touch of realism about it and we know, “Never forget your constituency base,” only too well, particularly as the election looms. We hope that we have not forgotten that in recent years.
My hon. Friend the Member for South Ribble (Seema Kennedy) made a brief point of order. It was her first point of order and, like all points of order, it was a bogus point of order, but it was charmingly bogus. We are very sorry to be losing her, but her three splendid sons are the beneficiaries.
The hon. Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones) made the most charming speech and reminded us about the Tea Room staff, who look after us so extraordinarily well at all hours. She has the one job in this place that I once wanted, which is Chair of the Petitions Committee. I was on the Procedure Committee to set it up, and I am afraid that I had my eyes on the post and then it became an Opposition post. When I mentioned to the Whips that I was keen on it, I think they thought that it had better be an Opposition post, and the hon. Lady has run that brilliant and important Committee with great panache.
The right hon. Member for Broadland (Mr Simpson) lamented the decline of old Etonians as Members of the House of Commons. I do sympathise with that position, and I am glad he made the point. I thought it might have been a little bit too much coming from me, but coming from him I am allowed, I think, to reinforce it. He is a great Tory Member, a great supporter of Tory Members, and a teacher of Tory Members with his fabulous book list, which he regularly sends round. I hope that he will continue to do so, because his reading list is always interesting. I would also highlight his work for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which is valued by everybody.
I cannot understand why the hon. Member for Wrexham (Ian C. Lucas) is retiring. He made a political commentary of importance, and I think he should stand at the next election and bring those points back to the House. I urge him to change his mind.
My hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton) is the kindest lady in the House of Commons. She has been a friend towards me since we  were elected at the same time, even when we have disagreed, and I love her confidence in Hansard. Hansard is so brilliant. Not only does it make a verbatim report, but it improves one’s English. It takes out all the split infinitives. I have only one disagreement with it, and that is that it thinks that “Government” is a plural, and I think it is a singular. My hon. Friend’s suggestion that Hansard should do even more work got nods and smiles from the Hansard representatives, so that will happen.
With all its heritage, the hon. Member for City of Durham (Dr Blackman-Woods) has a wonderful city to represent. She called the Library staff the unsung heroes, and we must sing more to the Library staff. There must be a tune for the parliamentary choir.
My hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Peter Heaton-Jones) is a wonderful champion of local service. He will be missed, and his views on the BBC are noted.
Turning to the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg), we all remember the Portillo moment. I had not realised that it was up there with the moon landings and the release of Nelson Mandela, but it was very humble of him—there has been humility in so many contributions—to say that that was based on a poll of readers of The Observer and Channel 4 viewers.
The Health and Social Care (Safety and Quality) Act 2015 that my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) presented is of great importance, and I so support his campaign for religious freedom and freedom of speech. I hope that his work will be continued when he is no longer in the House.
The most touching and moving speech of the day was from the hon. Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Teresa Pearce). I have hardly been more moved by a speech in this House. On that basis, I know that she will be missed. What she said about historical institutional abuse was really very shocking—what an extraordinary thing for her family to have coped with.
I am glad that my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) is supporting the PM. I am sorry that he has decided to leave at short notice.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness (John Woodcock) on the new baby, and I say to the hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Paul Farrelly) that 31 votes is enough.
I briefly want to mention my right hon. Friends the Members for Derbyshire Dales (Sir Patrick McLoughlin) and for Aylesbury (Sir David Lidington) and, the comedian of the House, the hon. Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound). What brilliant people we are losing. My right hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire Dales put me through to the candidates list. I would not be here without him, so he has that resting upon his conscience, but what a fine and distinguished career he has had. He is one of the true fantastic figures of the House. I clashed with my right hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury over Europe, but he is so courteous and so well informed and his arms never stop moving, which is fantastic. I will finish with our comedian: what will we do without him?
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered matters to be raised before the forthcoming Dissolution.

Stella Creasy: Mr Speaker, I rise for what is probably the last time for some time, for a number of reasons, to speak on behalf of my constituents about a matter of grave concern to them. We had thought we might have a bit longer to gather signatures, but the calling of a general election and my impending maternity leave has put paid to that. However, we are community that has long been concerned about the situation in Kashmir.
The petition states:
The petition of residents of Walthamstow,
Declares that the dispute in Kashmir should be resolved peacefully.
The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urge the UK Government to use its international standing to encourage India to engage in a comprehensive and sustained dialogue process with its neighbour Pakistan to resolve the Kashmir dispute, and urge the international community to play its role in securing a just and peaceful resolution of the Kashmir dispute in accordance with the aspirations of the people of Jammu and Kashmir.
And the petitioners remain, etc.
[P002545]

Michelle Donelan: Congratulations on your new position, Mr Speaker. I also congratulate the hon. Member for Ipswich (Sandy Martin) on securing this important debate.
Supporting children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities is one of my key priorities, so let me begin by stressing that I know and recognise that some families and teachers are unhappy, and both I and the Department are committed to listening to them. While I am pleased that we have been able to secure an additional £780 million in high-needs funding for next year, we do realise that this is about much more than just money. I want to ensure that children and young people with SEND have the best chance in life and that the system supports them to do this. That is why we have recently launched the SEND review, which will look at how the system has evolved since 2014 and how it can be made better for all families.
About 1.3 million children have special educational needs. In Suffolk alone, 4,735 children and young people have education, health and care plans, and a further 11,369 are in receipt of SEND support for Suffolk schools. The Government are clear that our ambition for these children is exactly the same as it is for all children: we want them to reach their full potential in school and college and to find employment and lead happy and fulfilled lives. I have seen this happening in my own constituency. The 2018 Ofsted-CQC SEND inspection report for Wiltshire said:
“Young people are increasingly well supported as they move into adult life.”
In 2014, we introduced major reforms to the SEND system to improve and streamline the support provided to children and young people with SEND, and to put their needs, and those of their families, at the heart of the SEND system. Local authorities, clinical commissioning groups and education, health and care providers have all been working hard to implement the reforms, and we recently heard from the Education Committee that they remain “the right ones”. But it is important to note that most parents think that they get a lot of support through parent carer forums, which are providing a crucial voice in local SEND decision making.
The Ofsted and CQC inspections of SEND services will see all local areas in England inspected by 2021, and they have identified a range of strengths in the way that local areas are delivering the reforms. The reforms made it clear that SEND decision making must be informed by, and co-produced with, children, young people and parents, and we have played our part in securing that. We have invested heavily in the development of parent carer forums in every local authority, and forums have received £2.3 million in grant funding each year since the reforms were introduced. Every local authority has in place an information, advice and support service that provides impartial, free advice for families. We know from SEND inspections that in most local areas families really value that advice and support.
We know that most children with SEND are educated within mainstream schools and colleges, and we have committed to maintaining and developing still further an inclusive mainstream system. This really can work, as I have seen in my own constituency, where Abbeyfield School’s latest inspection showed that the experiences of their children are proving effective for all. So to support inclusion, my Department has awarded a two-year contract to the National Association of Special Educational Needs and University College London, on behalf of the Whole School SEND consortium, to help to embed SEND into school improvement and equip the workforce to deliver high-quality teaching across all areas of SEND.
As I said, I know and appreciate that there are concerns, particularly from parents, about the way that the reforms have been delivered across the country. While strengths have been reported in every local area, SEND inspections have also identified weaknesses in many local services. This does include Suffolk, whose inspection report was published in January 2017, as alluded to by the hon. Gentleman. That report identified issues with SEND leadership and governance, the timeliness and integration of needs assessment systems, and the poor quality of the local offer. Nobody, for one minute, is denying or underestimating the importance of those grave concerns. Where there have been concerns, we have worked with partners, including NHS England. Support and challenge is offered to all areas required to produce an action plan through regular advice and monitoring from the Department for Education and NHS England advisers and through access to funded training opportunities and resources.

Michelle Donelan: I thank my hon. Friend, who has been an assiduous campaigner on this issue, as well as others. Of course it is important that we get the right resources and funding into areas, including Suffolk, so that they have the tools and ability to ensure that SEND children have the same opportunities, choices and chances in life.
I recognise that there have been problems in Suffolk, but I want to reassure the hon. Member for Ipswich that, despite what he said, we are monitoring progress closely. This remains a key priority for our Department. We will hold a formal progress review meeting later this month, to which stakeholders and parents will be invited. Despite what he said, Ofsted and the CQC highlighted several improvements since the original inspection, particularly in the area of governance and leadership, from which one would expect the rest to follow. Improvements were also found in access to speech and language therapy; positive work by outreach and inclusion services; activity to reduce exclusions; and the active role and contribution of the Suffolk parent carer forum in shaping the development of services.
Many areas are facing pressure on their high needs budgets, which the hon. Gentleman stressed. That is why we recently announced £780 million in additional high needs funding for next year, which is an increase of 12% compared with this year, bringing the total amount for supporting those in need to £7.2 billion. Every local authority will see an increase in high needs funding of at least 8% per head of population aged 2 to 18, with some seeing gains of up to 17% per head. In Suffolk, the provisional high needs funding allocation for 2020-21 is £75 million—a 17% per head increase, and a staggering amount, which I am sure the hon. Gentleman will welcome. In May 2019, we launched a call for evidence on financial arrangements for SEND and alternative provision. We are currently considering the responses and will look at the high needs formula in due course, to consider whether any changes are needed.
Creating the right number of school places in the right settings is a challenge. That is why I am pleased that Suffolk County Council is developing more than 800 new specialist education places between 2020 and 2025. That will include the establishment of three new specialist schools, up to 36 specialist units attached to mainstream schools and an in-county specialist setting for children with the most complex needs. As part of the capital programme, Suffolk will open a social, emotional and mental health school in Bury St Edmunds, which I know my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St Edmunds (Jo Churchill) was instrumental in ensuring. It is expected that those schools will open across the next two to three years. Alongside Suffolk’s capital programme, through the DFE scheme, it is opening two special free schools in Ipswich.
The hon. Gentleman has raised some important concerns today, and I once again thank him for securing the debate. The Government have invested heavily in reforms to the system for SEND support, and local areas are all working hard to ensure that they are a great success. However, we know there is further to go, and we remain determined to tackle the issues that exist. That is one of the reasons why we announced the SEND review. The review will consider how the system can provide the highest quality of support to enable children and young people with SEND to thrive and to prepare for adulthood, including employment. It will ensure that quality of provision is the same across the country and that there is joined-up thinking across health, care and education services. Finally, it will ensure that public money is spent in an efficient and effective way to deliver for all children.
Mr Speaker, I am delighted to have the final word of this Parliament on my passion for education, which I have always said has the ability to transform lives for all  children, including those with special educational needs. I must stress that I am committed to work relentlessly with my colleagues across the Government to ensure that the system delivers for all children—those in Suffolk and those up and down the country.
Question put and agreed to.
House adjourned.